Transcript CETL stage 2 planning day

Contention: assessment is the
most important thing we do for
HE students
Sally Brown
Pro-Vice-Chancellor and Professor
of HE Diversity in Learning and
Teaching
Leeds Metropolitan University
Perspectives on assessment
20-21 February 2006
My contention:
• How we go about assessing students can
make a significant impact on how well
they achieve in their studies;
• Poor assessment design will lead
students into behaviours that are
counter-productive to learning;
• Nothing we do for students is more
important than getting assessment
design right;
• Our roles as teachers thereby needs to
change radically, with less focus on
imparting knowledge and more focus on
supporting learning through assessment.
Good assessment process and
practice shape learning
Boud (1995) argues that
“Assessment methods and requirements
probably have a greater influence on how
and what students learn than any other
single factor. This influence may well be
of greater importance than the impact of
teaching materials”.
He also argues:
“Students can escape bad teaching, they
can’t escape bad assessment”.
Assessment can influence what
students do
“Assessment defines what students
regard as important, how they spend
their time and how they come to see
themselves as students and then as
graduates.
Students take their cues from what is
assessed rather than from what
lecturers assert is important.” (Brown
G, Bull J and Pendlebury, M1997 p7)
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If so, we need to re-engineer the
curriculum to focus more energy on
assessment
Student learning does not depend
exclusively on being taught by us;
Information can be accessed from a wide
range of sources, including e-materials;
Our role is to help them to learn how to
access, evaluate and use information
(whereas we normally focus too much on
delivering and testing recollection);
Formative assessment must be central to
our re-engineered. We don’t do enough
of it now: we must constructively align
(Biggs 2003)
Formative assessment helps
students learn the rules of the game
“The indispensable conditions for
improvement are that the student comes
to hold a concept of quality roughly
similar to that held by the teacher, is able
to monitor continuously the quality of
what is being produced during the act of
production itself, and has a repertoire of
alternative moves or strategies from
which to draw at any given point.
In other words, students have to be able to
judge the quality of what they are
producing and be able to regulate what
they are doing during the doing of it”.
What can institutions do? We can:
• Have a robust assessment strategy that
reinforces its integration with learning;
• Radically review our assessment
regulations to ensure they don’t make us
do stupid things;
• Support (require?) staff to use innovative
approaches to assessment that reduce
drudgery and concentrate on productive
activity for staff and students;
• Keep asking about our assessment
practices why, how, what, when and
where?
What can we do as individuals?
• Set small early assessed tasks (formative
or summative);
• Turn assignments round fast in the
crucial first semester;
• Monitor student attendance and take
action when students disappear and
particularly when work is not handed in;
• Make more time available for feedback;
• Do what we can to personalise the
assessment experience.
What else?
• Explore further the uses of computerassisted assessment (both formative and
summative);
• Plan to maximise the impact of feedback
by making students do something with it;
• Consider how to give them ‘instant
feedback’ immediately after submission of
work;
And….
• Help them to understand better what is
required when reading for different
purposes;
• Help them to get inside different
academic discourses when writing;
• Stop marking: start assessing!
Useful references
• Boud, D (1995) Enhancing learning through
self-assessment London, Routledge Falmer.
• Sadler, D R (1989) Formative assessment and
the design of instructional systems
Instructional Science 18, 119-144.
• Yorke M, 1999, Leaving Early: Undergraduate
Non-Completion in Higher Education, London,
Taylor and Francis.
• Yorke M and Longden B, 2004, Retention and
Student Success in Higher Education,
Maidenhead, Open University Press