Approaches to Assessment that Enhance Learning in Higher Education

Stylianos Hatzipanagos, Rebecca Rochon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415693257
• eBook ISBN: 9781317978404
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book addresses the need to diversify mainstream forms of assessment currently used in Higher Education in order to re-establish the focus on the learning process. Making assessment central to student learning is about returning to what current research emphasises: the primary beneficiary of assessment should be the student. To achieve this in the assessment context, students and tutors must engage in a process of dialogue and feedback. It seems to be widely accepted that assessment succeeds when the learner monitors, identifies and then is able to 'bridge' the gap between current learning achievements and agreed goals. It is, however, more questionable whether adequate opportunities are given to students to be active participants in closing what has been termed 'the loop'.

Contributors to this book have responded in different ways to the challenge of enhancing learning through assessment, offering reasons for the lack of focus on learning within assessment processes as well as suggesting possible solutions. The chapters demonstrate a balance between innovation and practicality, drawing on the underpinning theories. The result is both rich in discussion and an extremely useful resource for practitioners.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education.

Introduction: approaches to assessment that enhance learning

 

 

This special issue addresses the need to diversify mainstream forms of assessment currently used in higher education (HE) in order to re-establish the focus on the learning process. Making assessment central to student learning is about returning to what current research emphasises: the primary beneficiary of assessment should be the student. To achieve this in the assessment context, students and tutors must engage in a process of dialogue and feedback. It seems to be widely accepted, at least in educational research, that assessment succeeds when the learner monitors, identifies and then is able to ‘bridge’ the gap between current learning achievements and agreed goals. It is, however, more questionable whether adequate opportunities are given to the students to be active participants in closing what has been termed ‘the loop’.

Articles in this issue have responded in different ways to the challenge of enhancing learning through assessment. Some of these explore current practice chiefly characterised by formative input and examine the impact of transforming the traditional power relationships between learners and tutors. Others consider models of assessment that are innovative or attempt to redefine the concept of e-assessment by investigating the use of learning technologies to promote dialogue in relation to feedback. One article takes a broader view and considers complexity theory in relation to the issue of assessment. All of these contributions offer reasons for the lack of focus on learning within assessment processes, as well as suggesting possible solutions.

Using feedback as a formative tool depends on both the quality of the feedback and the students’ interaction with it, and several articles explore this topic. Nicol provides a balanced consideration of student feedback: while exploring this problem in depth, he offers solutions that are designed to be implemented at a practical level by academic staff. Nicol’s article includes an observation that encapsulates the theme central to this issue:

For students to learn they must do something with transmitted information, analyse the message, ask questions about it, discuss it with others, connect it with prior understanding and use this to change future actions. The same is true for feedback comments. While the quality of the comments is important, the quality of the students’ interaction with those comments is equally, and perhaps more, important. (503)

A study on formative feedback in the development of academic writing by Wingate confirms that there is a dual responsibility in the processing of feedback. Results of this study demonstrate that students who actively used feedback demonstrated improved learning. Wingate argues that more attention needs to be paid to tone, style and amount of feedback comments to ensure that students utilise them. However, this study also highlights that there is sometimes a lack of student engagement with feedback. In his work, Sadler examines this issue of non-engagement with feedback in greater detail. He identifies critical background knowledge that students must possess if they are to make productive interpretations of feedback statements, and outlines solutions to this issue.

Transforming the traditional power relationships between learners and tutors in assessment involves changing the roles of those typically at the centre of the experience to promote engagement: Cartney identifies peer formative assessment as a vehicle for closing the gap between feedback given to students and feedback effectively used by them. And, in his article, Jenkins discusses a multifaceted formative assessment approach that better enables students to engage in the assessment process. He argues for a reduction in summative assessment and the recognition of the need for better ‘information’ on the objectives of assessment. The claim of both articles is that innovative approaches have the potential to impact greatly on attempts to engage students with the feedback process.

Innovation in terms of approach may further involve focussing on the characteristics of the learner in the development of assessment with a view to enhancing learning. Hay, Tan and Whaites suggest, for example, that concept mapping may be useful for adults in assessing professional competences for learners, particularly those with professional experience in a related practice. This underlines that assessment strategies may be gainfully adapted to the learner’s individual needs.

Investigating the use of learning technologies in assessment as a means to enhance learning is undertaken by two articles. Webb considers the role of technology as a means to facilitate collaborative approaches to learning. Similarly, Daly et al. investigate formative e-assessment and successfully chart challenging territory: a series of case studies that claim technology can be used to a formative effect. They use a methodological approach (design patterns) that is innovative and has direct implications for practice. The outcomes of both articles emphasise that formative e-assessment succeeds when tutors and students utilise both social and technological resources.

Finally, using complexity theory to clarify issues relating to assessment and its intrinsic connection to learning, Elton highlights the difficulty in achieving a model in HE that truly focusses on learning. He cites, for example, the conflict between reliability and validity in assessment. Elton’s recommendation of a return to the development of academic staff as teachers to support an environment that is centred on learning is seemingly generic, yet this article deems it a necessary element of moving forward — far from external interferences, towards more meaningful forms of assessment.

The need to move away from traditional assessment practices within HE has long been identifed, but the direction and shape of emerging assessment practices is of significantly more importance. In this issue, the topic of assessment to enhance learning has been met with a variety of responses. The articles demonstrate a balance between innovation and practicality, drawing on the underpinning theories. The result is both rich in discussion, but also, we believe, a useful resource for practitioners.

We would like to thank Paul Black and Bob McCormick who have provided an insightful commentary for this special issue. Their observations not only complement this editorial by reflecting on emergent issues associated with the specific themes of the articles but also identify significant issues for development to stimulate further thinking about assessment in tertiary education.

Stylianos Hatzipanagos and Rebecca Rochon

Guest editors

Reflections and new directions

Paul Black^a and Robert McCormick^b

^aDepartment of Education and Professional Studies, King’s College London, London, UK;

^bDepartment of Education and Professional Studies, King’s College London, London, UK;

Introduction

In introducing these articles we are struck by two features. The first is that they comprise a rich set of resources for stimulating further thinking about tertiary education. The second, which follows from the first, is that they raise for us possibilities for further development of this field. We draw attention, in particular, to four such issues as follows:

(1) Studies in tertiary education should make more use of findings and theories about formative assessment which have emerged from studies of this topic in school education.

(2) There is a preponderance of concern about formative feedback on written work: the potential contexts for development of formative approaches could well be expanded to consider also oral dialogue, both in lecture theatres and in seminars or tutorials.

(3) Innovations should be discussed with a more explicit focus on how strategies for pedagogy can create the conditions for effective learning, in particular in the light of the aim of helping students to become independent in taking responsibility for their own learning.

(4) In the context of these discussions of links between assessment and learning, summative assessment deserves more discussion and innovation, directed at securing harmony with the formative in promoting learning. This might call for radical re-thinking about teaching and learning at the tertiary level.

In the snapshots of the seven articles which we present below, we draw attention to aspects in each which illustrate these four issues, leading to further discussion of them in the subsequent section.

Overview of the papers

Sadler gives a detailed and carefully structured analysis of feedback in terms of a general framework for clarifying its role in students’ learning. A recurrent theme is that the gap of understanding between teacher and student is far wider than teachers often realise, so that students misinterpret both the demands of a task and the meaning of comments offered as feedback. He expresses the main aim as ‘to bring students into a progressively mature capability in making evaluative judgements’. Although this appears to ignore the capacity to engage in effective action as lawyer, scientist and so on, it does reflect his overall stress on developing independence and on avoiding teacher dominance through those forms of ‘teaching’ which are based on an information transmission model. This is a strong and lucid exposition, but apart from a passing mention of oral dialogue, the analysis is entirely concerned with written feedback. In this mode, the burden of communication required to help learners share the tacit knowledge of their teacher is daunting, and he argues therefore for investment in peer-assessment pointing to its value in helping students share, through taking the role of assessors, the ways in which teachers refine their judgements of quality. What he does not address is the problem of training students, to develop good habits of collaborative discussion and to be critical in aligning judgements with the criteria which should guide such judgements. Adoption of peer work as the core practice in higher education would be a radical change, and one which would serve Sadler’s main aim. However, it is arguable that such a regime would need the support of high-quality oral dialogue between teachers and learners, together with a matching change in the regimes of summative assessment, features which the paper does not consider.

Sadler’s call for more exploration of the problems of those students who seem unable to benefit from feedback is echoed in the papers by Nicol and by Wingate. Nicol’s paper repeats and enlarges on Sadler’s formulation of the main learning aim of higher education, but contrasts this with the evidence, of widespread student dissatisfaction with written feedback, to underline the need for improvement. The central theme is that feedback should be analysed from a dialogical perspective in considering both teacher–student interaction and peer interaction. For peer-assessment, the paper broadens that concept, describing a rich set of different approaches, including ongoing peer dialogue between students as they prepare their written assignments, in order to meet the need for students to understand the goals of the work; discussion of earlier examples of work that attempted to meet those goals can be helpful here. There is, however, an explicit assumption that the ideal context for feedback is the individual tutorial, and an implicit assumption that the only alternative is peer-group work. Interactive dialogue of the teacher with a group deserves more attention.

In contrast to these general reviews, Wingate’s paper is a carefully thorough evaluation of a course for which the improvement of students’ writing skills was a main aim, so that care was taken over the details of the feedback practices, followed by detailed analysis of them. The work reinforces the message that both the intelligibility of any comments and the attitude and motivation of the recipient are as important in written feedback as they are in oral interaction. This paper also raises the particular problems of the weaker students; their difficulties were in part linked to failure to pay attention to the feedback rather than to its inadequacy, and important suggestions are offered about how to make feedback more effective for them. Tutors ought to be more sensitive to the negative effects of large numbers of critical comments. In both these respects, the findings mirror those of work on assessment for learning at school level, and the researches of Dweck (2000) and of Butler (1998) give helpful evidence and insights about ways to avoid the de-motivating effects of negative comments. This paper is distinctive in that two of the three written assignments were graded for the summative assessment of the course, and for one of these students were encouraged to use the feedback to help improve the next one.

A second detailed study of interactive dialogue with students is described in Webb’s paper. This paper draws more extensively on the literature about school-based studies, notably about analyses of dialogue and about the use of activity theory to guide the evaluation of an innovation. This may in part be linked to the intriguing dual focus of this study, for the students were trainee school teachers, with a first degree in ICT, who needed feedback in developing their ability to serve as ICT specialists in schools, and who were at the same time exploring in their school practice the use of ICT tools and the application of formative assessment methods. This faces Webb with a complex relationship between the nature of collaboration, the actual tasks given to teachers (e.g. lesson planning), formative assessment processes and the role of technology: we wonder whether the potential analyses available to those in tertiary education are sufficient to cope with this complexity. Webb turns to the literature from the school sector on collaborative learning for guidance, making explicit use of sources that helped interpret the work in terms of a model of pedagogy. She draws on van Lier (1996) on the use of managed talk to achieve transformation in role relationships and in procedures, and on Black and Wiliam (2009) on the teacher’s responsibility to act, not merely as a facilitator, but to engineer opportunities for students both to learn and to develop learning autonomy. Developing and auditing the quality of the collaboration between students in their peer-group discussions is a key aim of this study. One striking finding is that these graduates had difficulty in participating in peer-group collaboration work aimed at developing shared understanding: their undergraduate experience was of groups working to the more urgent and less reflective aim of achieving a project product. One distinctive feature of this innovation is the aim of enhancing the use of ICT tools to enable rapid student interaction. Here, such aids as wikis, tablet PCs and – with some reservations about their inflexible structure – online discussion boards are seen as helpful mediating artefacts. As with Wingate’s work, attention is also paid to achieve a positive interaction between the formative and the summative, one helpful move being to foster group collaboration to share ideas about the planning and preparation of a written assignment prior to each individual’s production of that assignment.

The account by Daly and her colleagues of formative e-assessment used Webb’s project as an illustration in setting up the work with teachers and also pays attention to the school literature, including that on learning and pedagogy. The emphasis is on pedagogy, but, like Laurillard’s Conversational Framework on which it draws, it does not make a clear distinction between models of pedagogy and theories of learning. For the former, it draws on Black and Wiliam’s (2009) framework to analyse the various formative strategies used in the work. Whilst this framework is carefully deployed, it is not a tool for analysing learning. The problem about this aspect of the analysis is illustrated by the statement that, in responses to digital artefacts, ‘a learner opens up a window on their thinking’. This claims too much: a response to any challenge, be it in a digital or in an oral exchange, has to be interpreted in terms of a model of the thinking that produced it a task of great difficulty. The window is not transparent. This is related to another key point made in this paper, namely that it is not the use of technology per se that matters but that: ‘We should … be concerned with … social and individual cognitive resources within a coherent view of learning as “conversational”’ (this issue, 632). We return to this issue in our third section.

Hay and his colleagues examine whether or not concept mapping offers an alternative assessment approach to the traditional multiple-choi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• 1. Introduction: approaches to assessment that enhance learning
• 2. Reflections and new directions
• 3. From monologue to dialogue: improving written feedback processes in mass higher education
• 4. The impact of formative feedback on the development of academic writing
• 5. Beyond feedback: developing student capability in complex appraisal
• 6. Exploring the use of peer assessment as a vehicle for closing the gap between feedback given and feedback used
• 7. A multi-faceted formative assessment approach: better recognising the learning needs of students
• 8. Non-traditional learners in higher education: comparison of a traditional MCQ examination with concept mapping to assess learning in a dental radiological science course
• 9. Beginning teacher education and collaborative formative e-assessment
• 10. Exploring formative e-assessment: using case stories and design patterns
• 11. Complexity theory - an approach to assessment that can enhance learning and - more generally - could transform university management
• Index