Planning and Implementing Assessment

Freeman, Richard, Lewis, Roger (BP Professor of Learning Development, University of Humberside)

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781135363659
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This title outlines a set of principles and analytical methods that can be adapted to different assessment scenarios designed to enable readers to construct their own effective methods for assessment. Guidelines for design and methods of planning, choosing and implementation are provided.

Part One
Principles of assessment

Chapter 1
The purposes of assessment

Introduction

Teachers, trainers or lecturers are inevitably involved in assessing learners. Indeed, this is probably the most important part of your work, although it may not occupy most of your time. This book will help you design and carry out assessment, taking account of the best current thinking and practice. We cover both the underlying principles (which are unchanging) and the best ways of achieving these. We begin by defining 'assessment' and looking at the purposes it serves to ensure that it meets the various, and sometimes conflicting, requirements of the main partners in the educational process - the students, teachers and society more generally.

The importance of assessment can scarcely be overemphasized. It is generally agreed to be the single most important influence on learning:

If all other elements of the course point in one direction and the assessment arrangements in another, then the assessment arrangements are likely to have the greatest influence on the understood curriculum.

Erwin and Knight, 1995, p181

Unfortunately, assessment often works against, rather than for, learning:

Assessment can encourage passive, reproductive forms of learning while simultaneously hiding the inadequate understanding to which such forms of learning inevitably lead.

In some cases:

courses tend neither to develop basic concepts well, nor use assessment tasks which allow staff or students to know whether concepts have been learned.

Boud, 1995b, p39

Assessment myths

The design and practice of assessment can be hampered by a number of common myths, including that:

• assessment must always be a competitive process, with learners pitted against one another
• the excellence of the few requires the failure of the many
• fear of failure is the best form of motivation
• collaboration between learners is cheating
• assessment only happens at die end of a course
• assessment processes must be hidden from the learner
• anxiety and pain are necessary accompaniments to rigorous assessment
• assessment can be fully objective and scientific
• if students assess themselves, they are always overly generous.

The information you will find in this book dispels these myths. If you follow the practical advice, which is supported by research findings, you will be able to design effective assessment strategies that achieve their aims and promote learner success.

Some Definitions

First, what is 'assessment', what is it to 'assess' someone? According to Brown, et al. (1997), the term comes from the Latin 'ad sedere', which means to sit down beside. Thus, they continue, assessment 'is primarily concerned with providing guidance and feedback to the learner'. We argue in the course of the book that this is indeed the main function of assessment, but the original use of this word was quite different. Looking it up in The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary and Chambers Dictionary reveals that the sense of 'sit down beside' derives from the word's use by the legal profession, meaning to sit down beside judges in a court. Some five or six hundred years ago, an assessor was a person who advised a judge or magistrate on technical points (compare the word 'assize') and these technical points seem largely to have related to fines or taxes. Indeed, the word is still used in relation to income tax (a tax assessment) and various kinds of insurance (the assessment of loss). The main meanings of 'assess' (from earliest to latest use) have been to:

• fix the amount of a tax or fine
• impose a tax or fine on a person or community
• estimate the value of (property, income and so on) for taxation
• estimate the worth or extent of, judge or evaluate.

The last meaning is closest to the one we use in education ~ a meaning associated with the word only since the middle of the twentieth century. For the purposes of this book, the word 'assess' is used in this fourth sense - to judge the extent of students' learning.

Assessment as a sample of behaviour

Evidence of the extent of students' learning comes from their behaviour. We use the word 'behaviour' here in its broadest sense. This is because the students' behaviour may be specific to a course or more general; it may encompass a wide range of activities (oral, written and practical); what is assessed may be focused on a product (such as a report, a poem), on the process by which a product is created or on process alone; any combination of these. In contemporary parlance, these constitute the 'evidence' on which a judgement may be based.

You can assess only a sample of the behaviour - it is impracticable to do otherwise. With a mathematics course, for example, you cannot set questions on every possible combination of numbers. Equally, if someone is taking a driving test, you cannot see how they react to every conceivable motoring challenge.

Given this practical constraint, you have to think about two criteria of good assessment. First, you have to sample behaviour that is relevant (or 'representative') of the required performance. A student's writing ability is, for example, irrelevant to the assessment of a course designed to teach horse-riding. Second, your judgement has to be based on a sufficient sample. If you are teaching the four rules of arithmetic, you would have to include questions on addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, but also ensure that enough questions on these areas were asked for it to be possible to assume that the student could operate competently across the range.

When we assess, we make inferences about students' current and future performance. We draw conclusions about what they currently can and cannot do. Student A, for example, can add but not subtract up to three figures. This is also a prediction of future performance for, under normal circumstances, we assume Student A will continue to perform in this way.

Assessment - in current educational discussion in the United Kingdom - is distinct from 'evaluation' (in spite of the dictionary definition above). Assessment focuses on die learning of the students, evaluation on the way the various components of a course perform - such as, for example, the syllabus, resources and teacher. Assessment results are one source of information used for an evaluation. Assessment focuses on the performance of the students, evaluation on the performance of the provider and the provision. (In the USA the two terms are used differently.)

Reasons for Assessing: Purposes

Many different purposes underlie assessment. In practice, they overlap, but they can be grouped under five headings:

• to select
• to certificate
• to describe
• to aid learning
• to improve teaching.

To select

Assessment helps with selection - for example, when choosing students for a further course or for employment. This is an example of using assessment to predict - for instance, which students will benefit from further study or how individuals might perform in employment. This is seen most obviously in the old 11+ examination, and in the idea (increasingly discredited) that a certain level of performance at 'A' level predicts success at university. Selection can be independent of the learners' wishes. Someone failing the old 11+, for example, would have been very unlikely to have had their wish to go to a grammar school fulfilled. However, selection can help the learner make a choice, for example between options at a certain stage in their school career. In this case, it moves closer to the purpose of aiding learning.

Selection has historically been linked to the ranking of students and, thus, as the next chapter discusses, with 'norm-referenced assessment'. Assessment in this form has been a means of positioning students in order of merit or achievement. Then, those at the top of the list may be selected for further opportunities when these are (as is often the case) rationed.

To certificate

This somewhat ugly phrase relates to the function of confirming that a student has reached a particular standard. This may be in the form of a simple pass or fail (as with the driving test) or the same decision being phrased 'competent' or 'not yet competent', as is the case with national vocational qualifications. Assessment in these and similar circumstances certifies that a particular level of performance has been achieved. This can be linked to a licence to practise - for example, as a plumber or an airline pilot.

To describe

Sometimes the outcome of assessment is a bald statement - a certificate, grade, mark. Recently, there has been a move towards describing what a student has learned or can do in greater detail. For example, this can be done in the form of a 'profile' (see Chapter 23),

To aid learning

Assessment can help students learn. As mentioned earlier, we view this as being a particularly important purpose. Assessment can stimulate learning in many different ways. For example, by:

• prompting or otherwise motivating students
• giving students practice so they can see how well they are achieving learning outcomes
• following the practice with feedback to help students diagnose their strengths and areas that need to improve
• providing information that helps students plan what to do next
• helping students, and others concerned with their learning, to track progress.

To improve teaching

Earlier, we distinguished between 'assessment' and 'evaluation'. Assessment information can help you review the effectiveness of all your learning arrangements. If, for example, your students regularly find an assignment difficult, this might suggest that it is too demanding and you may need to change the learning methods, revise the learning outcomes or help die students gain some relevant technical skills, such as writing or setting up laboratory experiments. Assessment can help you see the impact of your teaching and make adjustments accordingly.

Erwin (1997) extends this point, saying that assessment results can also inform wider institutional decisions. For example:

• which units/modules a school or college continues to offer
• which staff to recruit.

Assessment results increasingly have resourcing implications, with, for instance, underperforming subjects perhaps being closed do...