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 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)

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”. (Sadler 1989). (my italics)

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 computer- assisted 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, 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