Assessment, learning and judgement: Emerging directions

Abstract

This book began by noting the complexity of assessment of student learning as a field of scholarship and practice and proposing a re-consideration of a range of issues concerning the very meaning of assessment, the nature and process of making professional judgements about the quality of students' work, the various relationships between assessment and the process of student learning, and the intricacies of changing how assessment is thought of and practised across an institution. The complexities of assessment are indicated by the range of matters addressed in this single volume: foundational empirical research; the role of the work context in determining approaches to assessment; how judgements are made; the limitations of grades as reporting instruments; quality measures for new modes of assessment; students' experience of assessment cultures; assessment as a source of insight for teaching; the role of plagiarism in subverting learning; and the principles and processes involved in institution-wide enhancement of assessment. Perhaps it is appropriate that the penultimate chapter drew on complexity theory as an aid to understanding higher education institutions in search of improved assessment. Each author has argued for changes in thinking and/or practice within the particular focus of their chapter. However, the chapters' various foci are not isolated from each other; they are inter-related in building a picture of a coherent culture of assessment appropriate for the first decades of the 21st century. Thus the definition of assessment proposed in the introductory chapter provides a basis for understanding the approaches to assessment discussed in each of the chapters, while its emphasis on assessment as judgement is particularly reinforced by Boud and Sadler. Dochy's argument for edumetric rather than psychometric standards for judging the quality of assessment provides support for the forms of assessment that encourage ability-based learning (Riordan and Loacker) and require students to create rather than simply find answers to assessment tasks (Carroll). And the capacity for self-assessment which underpins Riordan and Loacker's work at Alverno College is the very same capacity which forms the basis for Yorke's approach to students' claims making in relation to their own learning at the completion of their degree. The notion of assessment cultures introduced by Ecclestone highlights the importance of understanding assessment in terms of students' and teachers' experience of assessment, an experience which permeates their careers (whether as students or teachers) and which must be accommodated as students encounter the new approaches to assessment argued for in this book. Finally, using assessment results to improve teaching, and devising specific ways of doing this in relation to particular forms of assessment (Suskie), is a principle that can be applied to each of the approaches to assessment argued for elsewhere in the book, not least in relation to those approaches that place students' developing the capacity to evaluate their own work at the heart of assessment in support of learning. Thus, while the chapters have been conceived independently (though admittedly within the context of the learning-oriented assessment approach noted in the Preface), there is a high degree of coherence across them, so that the book as a whole constitutes a consistent argument for an integrated approach to assessment based on a set of progressions: from conceptualizing assessment as a process of quasi-measurement, to conceptualizing assessment as a process of informing, and making, judgements; from judgements based on criteria abstracted from an informed understanding of quality, to judgements based on an holistic appreciation of quality; from assessments located within the frame of reference of the course, to assessments located in a frame of reference beyond the course in the world of practice; from simple grades as expressions of achievement, to more complex and comprehensive representations of knowledge and abilities; from assessment as the endpoint of learning, to assessment as a starting point for teaching; from assessment as discipline-and course-focused, to assessment focused on generic abilities aligned with discipline knowledge; from standardised testing, to qualitative judgements of competence through practice-based or practice-like tasks; from students as objects of assessment, to students as active subjects participating in assessing their own work; and from a conception of the university as an organisation susceptible to systemic change through managerial interventions, to a conception of the university as a complex organism where change depends on the values, intentions and actions of interdependent actors. These movements raise a number of challenges, each far from trivial, which could well set the agenda for theorising, researching, and acting to improve assessment for the next decade and beyond.