Fundamental assessment principles to support student learning

1. Assessment tasks should be designed to ensure that students spend their study time in productive ways: tasks should encourage ‘time on task’ (eg, in and outside class), should lead to a more even distribution of study effort (over the timeline of the course), should engage students in deep rather than surface learning and should communicate clear and high expectations (Gibbs and Simpson cited in Nicol, 2007).
2. Assessment feedback should be of sufficient quantity, timely, it should focus on learning not just marks (emphasize the learning aspects of assessment, that is learning elements are emphasized more than measurement ones), it should be related to assessment criteria and be understandable, attended to and actually used by students to make improvements in their work (ibid).
   

References:
Nicol, D. (2007). 'Laying a foundation for lifelong learning: case studies of technology-supported assessment in large first year classes'. British Journal of Educational Technology. 38.4, pp. 668-678.

Curriculum as product: which problems arise for assessment

Education is most often seen as a technical exercise. Objectives are set, a plan drawn up, then applied, and the outcomes (products) measured.

Fundamental questions: a) What educational purposes should the school seek to attain?, b) How can we determine whether these purposes are being attained?

1) There are questions around the nature of objectives. This model is hot on measurability. It implies that behaviour can be objectively, mechanistically measured. There are obvious dangers here - there always has to be some uncertainty about what is being measured. We only have to reflect on questions of success in our work. It is often very difficult to judge what the impact of particular experiences has been. Sometimes it is years after the event that we come to appreciate something of what has happened. In order to measure, things have to be broken down into smaller and smaller units. The result, as many of you will have experienced, can be long lists of often trivial skills or competencies. This can lead to a focus in this approach to curriculum theory and practice on the parts rather than the whole; on the trivial, rather than the significant. It can lead to an approach to education and assessment which resembles a shopping list. When all the items are ticked, the person has passed the course or has learnt something. The role of overall judgment is somehow sidelined.
2) There is the problem of unanticipated results. The focus on pre-specified goals may lead both educators and learners to overlook learning that is occurring as a result of their interactions, but which is not listed as an objective.

I believe there is a tendency, recurrent enough to suggest that it may be endemic in the approach, for academics in education to use the objectives model as a stick with which to beat teachers. 'What are your objectives?' is more often asked in a tone of challenge than one of interested and helpful inquiry. The demand for objectives is a demand for justification rather than a description of ends... It is not about curriculum design, but rather an expression of irritation in the problems of accountability in education. (Stenhouse 1974: 77)

Copied from
Smith, M. K. (1996, 2000). Curriculum theory and practice. The encyclopedia of informal education. Retrieved: 11 January 2010. http://www.infed.org/biblio/b-curric.htm

What conditions assessment should meet

There is good evidence that student achievement is related, first and foremost, to engagement (Astin, 1997). Engagement does not simply equate to the amount of involvement in and time on task, important though that is. It extends to learners’ engagement in communities of practice, to their involvement in a variety of networks and to the amount and quality of interchanges with others. Cognitive engagements with others are powerful stimuli for learning (learning as social acts, Vygotsky).
The award of a degree should attest that graduates have largely achieved what the curriculum specifies, with the added implication that what has been achieved is, in some measure, transferable.

Notice that these assessments have at least three conditions to meet if they are to be consistent with the account of learning that has just been sketched.
1. They have to be faithful to the curriculum (charged with developing understandings, skills, self-theories and reflectiveness).
2. They must align with the notion that education is concerned with some degree of abstraction, generalisation or transfer.
3. They should not impede student engagement in communities of practice, but should encourage behaviours associated with good learning.


Copied from
Knight, P. (2002). Summative assessment in higher education: practices in disarray. Studies in Higher Education, 27.3, pp. p275-86.