Innovative Assessment

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Innovative Assessment

• New Psychology lecturers forum, 3rd Jan 2008
• Peter Reddy

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Innovative assessment Outline

• Your best assessment as a student
• What makes a good assessment
• What is assessment for
• Some innovative assessment ideas
• Design your own!!!

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Task 1 Your best assessment as a student

• Think of your favourite assessment when you were
  an undergraduate
• In groups of three or four, discuss
• What made it a good assessment from your point of
  view?
• What does it reveal about the tasks that you like
  doing?
• Solving problems?
• Learning, discovering, finding out, researching?
• Reading?
• Writing?

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Task 2 What makes a good assessment?

• Drawing on your undergraduate experience of good
  assessments, in groups of three or four, create a
  list of features that a good assessment should
  have

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Can all features be combined in a single
assessment?

• Patterns of assessment
• At the start of a course may need
• Simple scaffolded tasks
• Fast feedback
• Opportunities to ask questions, form
  relationships
• Tasks that build something
• Progressive difficulty and complexity
• Communicate expectations
• Build confidence
• Allow social comparison
• Formative / summative distinction
• Supporting engagement and learning, allowing for
  discrimination

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Task 3 What is assessment for?

• To what extent is it to
• Structure and guide learning?
• Define the course of study for the student?
• Fairly discriminate between students?
• Support interest and motivation?
• Set challenges
• Once more in groups

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Should we tell students what University Education
and assessment is for?

• Is HE too instrumental?
• Staff focus on RAE returns?
• Students focus on degree grade to get the right
  job?
• Both are poor measures
• Employers look for competencies, not degree
  grades
• Need to think more about what University
  education is for
• See Graham, G. (2005). The institution of
  intellectual values Realism and idealism in
  Higher Education. Exeter, Imprint Academic.
• We want deeply engaged students really interested
  in what they learning?

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Assessment and workload

• Can innovation improve workload as well as
  student learning and discrimination?
• Innovation can take time and effort but can also
  save it in marking time.
• Marking essays from large groups a deeply
  aversive task!
• Some ideas
• Create website
• Seminar groups and semi-unseen exams
• Pub quiz
• On-line quiz http//www.indiana.edu/intell/hotTop
  ics.shtml
• Some quiz problems
• Task 4 Design your own assessment pattern