Excellence in University Assessment

Learning from award-winning practice

David Carless

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317580720
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Assessment in higher education is an area of intense current interest, not least due to its central role in student learning processes. Excellence in University Assessment is a pioneering text which contributes to the theory and practice of assessment through detailed discussion and analysis of award-winning teaching across multiple disciplines. It provides inspiration and strategies for higher education practitioners to improve their understanding and practice of assessment.

The book uses an innovative model of learning-oriented assessment to analyze the practice of university teachers who have been recipients of teaching awards for excellence. It critically scrutinizes their methods in context in order to develop key insights into effective teaching, learning and assessment processes. Pivotal topics include:

• Competing priorities in assessment and ways of tackling them
• The nature of quality assessment task design
• The student experience of assessment
• Promoting student engagement with feedback

An indispensable contribution to assessment in higher education, Excellence in University Assessment is a valuable guide for university leaders, middle managers, staff developers, teachers and researchers interested in the crucial topic of assessment.

PART I Learning and assessment

Introduction Setting the scene

10.4324/9781315740621-1

Assessment is a topic which is hotly debated in both academic circles and in the media. Does examination success equate with high standards? Are we assessing the right kinds of things? Is assessment fair and reliable? Does assessment help students to develop the skills they need for lifelong learning? Does assessment empower or ensnare students and how might they take greater responsibility for their own learning? What kinds of feedback process can effectively inform students about their progress and prompt ongoing improvement? What kinds of assessment task are most promising in supporting student learning? Is there too much time devoted to assessment and not enough to worthwhile non-assessed tasks? Is assessment a symptom of accountability undermining academic freedom? The list of questions could go on and on, such is the extent of issues that arise from assessment.

In this book, I do not intend to address all these issues in detail. Instead, I put forward a vision for assessment in universities in which the major priority is advancing student learning. After all, education should be about student learning and the development of how to learn effectively. So much time and effort are spent on assessment that it needs to be more efficient in enhancing processes and outcomes of learning. Assessment is sometimes seen as a malignant force or an unwanted chore which reinforces the need for us to harness it to promote powerful student learning. An obvious function of assessment is for grading and certification purposes and it is important that this reaches acceptable levels of reliability and fairness. The quest for accurate grades does not, however, overturn my belief that students are best served when they develop meaningful learning from the assessments they undertake.

How I came to be interested in assessment

I first started being responsible for teaching courses on assessment on teacher education programmes in the mid-1990s, partly because my more senior colleagues wished to avoid the topic as they perceived assessment as something painful and difficult. The chore of marking vast amounts of uninspiring student work loomed large in their minds. At around the turn of the century, more attractive aspects of assessment became high profile with the dissemination of work associated with the Assessment Reform Group in the UK and particularly the landmark literature review (Black and Wiliam, 1998) on the potential learning gains arising from well-conducted formative assessment. This work provided strategies for implementation and research evidence from different contexts across levels of education about how assessment could effectively support student learning. It presented a new research-based view of the learning potential of strategies, such as: clear learning intentions and success criteria; questioning and dialogue to engineer productive classroom discussion; peer assessment; self-evaluation; and the development of effective feedback processes. A key point, however, was that practical implementation was difficult. Under the influence of these ideas, I have carried out a variety of funded projects exploring the interplay between student learning and assessment in relation to schooling and higher education.

Working in the context of Hong Kong, where students are defined by summative assessment, impelled me to look at ways in which assessment could support learning even when school tests, examinations and results are dominant (Carless, 2011). In the current work, I explore the potential for learning-oriented assessment at the university level. At the tertiary level, there are some similar and some different considerations impacting on the interplay between assessment and student learning. For example, the greater maturity and competence of students may enable them to carry out richer and more complex assessment tasks. The less frequent contact between staff and students in universities as opposed to schools can reduce opportunities for regular feedback and negotiation of requirements. In both contexts, the dominance of summative assessment through examinations or other end-of-cycle tasks is a factor that captures the hearts and minds of students.

What this book is about

Many books discuss assessment. In recent years, most of them have been edited collections or otherwise developed collaboratively by groups of authors. Very few have been sole-authored, and few report research evidence across multiple disciplines. My aim is to fill this gap by developing a coherent and sustained vision of excellence in assessment and exemplifying it with classroom research evidence from diverse disciplines.

This book is about the relationship between assessment and student learning in undergraduate education, and how tensions between the two might be managed. I present the case for assessment being predominantly focused on the development of productive student learning processes. I call this ‘learning-oriented assessment’, which I define as assessment which places a primary focus on improving student learning, including summative assessment which stimulates appropriate student engagement. I propose a framework of learning-oriented assessment focusing on three interlocking elements: the kind of assessment tasks which students carry out; how students develop evaluative expertise through gaining a sense of what quality looks like in their discipline; and student engagement with feedback. The aim of the framework is to encapsulate the core elements of a learning-oriented assessment approach and indicate their interrelationships.

At the heart of the book is the interplay between learning-oriented assessment and classroom practice. Accordingly, space is afforded to in-depth discussion of specific assessment tasks, teachers’ rationale for them and students’ responses; how students react to criteria and make inferences about quality work; and the management of feedback process. The case studies of classroom practice are drawn from my recent research into the practices of teachers who have been recipients of teaching awards at the University of Hong Kong (HKU), a leading international English-medium research university. Their commitment to their students makes award-winning teachers a particularly worthwhile site for research. The analysis and dissemination of the pedagogy of quality teachers has the potential to inform the theory and practice of assessment and exemplify how assessment is implemented across diverse disciplines. A main strength of the book lies in this discussion of assessment in context.

The choice of award-winning teachers as the unit of analysis does not imply that the teacher is at the forefront at the expense of the learner. The student orientation and interpretation is crucial, so a major consideration is to explore students’ views of the assessment tasks they were undertaking; how they engaged with quality in the discipline; and how they generated or responded to feedback. A detailed analysis of the important student voice on teaching, learning and assessment practices within specific disciplinary contexts is a feature of the book.

One of the problems in the theory and practice of assessment is the relative lack of coherent scholarship, by which I mean building cumulatively on strands of relevant theory and practice so as to address key issues. Accordingly, further features of the book are reviewing the relevant research base to provide a state-of-the-art treatment of key issues impacting on learning-oriented approaches to assessment; evaluating realistically where we are now; and pointing some ways ahead.

The main aims of the book are summarised as follows:

• to conceptualise and exemplify a framework of learning-oriented assessment through critically analysing the practices of award-winning teachers;
• to contribute to the theory of assessment by providing state-of-the-art literature reviews and analyses of relevant learning-oriented assessment issues;
• to discuss implications for practice of a learning-oriented assessment approach by analysing the interface between assessment and learning contextualised within different disciplines;
• to enable the expression of the important student voice on assessment issues; and
• to present a vision of excellence in assessment.

In short, I seek to put assessment under the microscope, share some good practices from award-winning teachers and bring out some of the complexities of implementing a learning-oriented assessment perspective. Underpinning both the theory of learning-oriented assessment and its practices in classrooms is a quest for change and improvement in the practice of assessment. In the final chapter, I suggest some ways forward for assessment practices and make a number of recommendations on the path towards excellence in assessment.

Learning-oriented assessment

The idea of learning-oriented assessment is that all assessment should support the advancement of student learning. I call this approach learning-oriented assessment. From synthesising and reformulating key literature on assessment for learning in higher education, three interrelated elements are derived and articulated in Figure I.1. The role of the framework is to depict the integration of three key drivers of learning-oriented assessment. It is a simple and uncluttered framework, and hopefully a powerful one. The main argument developed in the book is that it is the interplay of these three elements which impacts significantly on the kind of learning which students derive from assessment processes. As such, these concepts and their implementation in diverse disciplines anchor the volume.

Figure I.1 Learning-oriented assessment framework

The framework was first developed with colleagues working at the Hong Kong Institute of Education, particularly Gordon Joughin (Carless, Joughin, Liu and associates, 2006; Carless, Joughin and Mok, 2006) and has been updated in the current work. I discuss the revised version of the framework below, drawing on a recent paper (Carless, 2014).

The apex of the framework is represented by the assessment tasks which students are carrying out as parts of the courses for their degree programmes. Assessment tasks strongly influence how students direct their effort and what kinds of approaches they favour. Learning-oriented assessment tasks are those which propel student engagement and approaches in productive directions (elaborated in Chapter 2). The two arrows which point from the top to the bottom of Figure I.1 are indicative that the design of the assessment task or tasks impinges on potential prospects for the development of evaluative expertise and engagement with feedback.

Learning-oriented assessment tasks are supported by the interconnected elements, illustrated in Figure I.1 by inverted arrows, of evaluative expertise and engagement with feedback. ‘Evaluative expertise’ denotes the evolving ability of students to engage with quality and develop their self-evaluative capacities. This is at the heart of student progress because, to improve their learning, students need to know what quality performance looks like.

Feedback processes, in which students engage with and use feedback, are strong drivers for student learning and improvement. Feedback, however, is a difficult issue to manage effectively for a number of reasons, which have been extensively discussed in the literature in recent years (e.g. Evans, 2013). Explicit in the framework is the interconnection between feedback and evaluative expertise. For students to engage effectively with feedback, they need to develop a sense of quality to facilitate the decoding of feedback messages.

Structure of the book

The main argument is that student learning is deeply influenced by the three elements of learning-oriented assessment: the assessment tasks which they undertake; their development of evaluative expertise; and their engagement with feedback processes. I seek to illustrate how these elements play out in different disciplinary contexts. In line with this focus, the book is structured as follows.

In Chapter 1, I discuss key issues which represent competing priorities for assessment and may act as challenges for learning-oriented assessment. Outcomes-based approaches are highlighted as a potential facilitating factor for a focus on student learning outputs.

In Chapter 2, I discuss the underpinnings of the framework for learning-oriented assessment; analyse relevant aspects of student approaches to learning; and discuss the role of student engagement. I explain the rationale for researching award-winning teachers and outline the conduct of the fieldwork for the research on which this book is based.

The main content of the volume follows from the learning-oriented assessment framework. The structure is built around three syntheses of literature (Chapters 3, 7 and 10), which are anchored thematically in relation to the three elements of learning-oriented assessment. The other chapters illustrate how the concepts are operationalised by teachers, and how students experience them (Chapters 4–6, 8–9 and 11).

In Chapter 3, I review and synthesise literature on assessment task design and implementation by analysing different kinds of assessment tasks and discussing their strengths and weaknesses. I set out a framework of assessment task design to promote student cognitive engagement.

Chapters 4, 5 and 6 follow from Chapter...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• PART I Learning and assessment
• PART II Designing and implementing assessment tasks
• PART III Engaging with quality criteria
• PART IV Reconceptualising feedback and ways forward
• References
• Author index
• Subject index