Developing Assessment and Learning

Dr Peter Kahn

University of Manchester

Outline

• Introduction

• Characteristics of effective learning

• Designing assessment to ensure effective learning– Case study: the patchwork text

• Adapting your own practice– Discussion in pairs/threes

Aims

• To explore how assessment drives student learning.

• To analyse and develop your own assessment practice in the light of:– characteristics of effective learning;– factors influencing the relationship between

assessment and student learning;– a variety of assessment methods.

Introduction

• Purposes for assessment:– assessment as a driver for learning;– assessment to grade students.

• Need to ensure more efficient assessment while still grading and supporting learning.

• What proportion of the total learning time do your

students spend in-class as compared to out-of-class?

• ‘Assessment is the most powerful lever teachers have to influence the way students respond to courses and behave as learners.’ Gibbs (1999)

• Recent developments in Higher Education only increase its power:– Student fees, employment, competition for

graduate employment.

Effective learning

• Consider a specific course unit or programme in which you are involved.

– What do you ideally want the learning on this course unit or programme to look like?

– How would you like it to be characterised?

One possible ‘wish list’

• Students regularly spend time on task

• Students prioritise complex tasks

• Students get frequent feedback

• Students interact with each other

• Students take responsibility for the quality of their work

adapted from Gibbs (1999)

• Does the assessment on your course unit or programme currently promote learning of this nature?

– Detail both the ways in which it promotes this type of learning, and how it promotes other (perhaps less desirable) types of learning.

Designing assessment

• Explicitly consider the match between a range of possible assessment tasks and the desired learning.

• Value of programme-wide and synoptic approaches to assessment, creating space for a focus on learning.

The patchwork text ...

A coursework assignment that is:– cumulative, multi-voiced, synoptic,

structurally unified, reflective, critical, lends itself to peer and formative feedback, and confidence-building.

(see Winter, Parker and Ovens, 2003)

Adapting practice

• Share with one or two colleagues your earlier deliberations on assessment and the characteristics of effective learning.

– What specific changes can you introduce into your own assessment to better reflect the desired learning?

Acknowledgements

• Gibbs G (1999) Using assessment strategically to change the way students learn, in Assessment Matters in Higher Education, eds Brown S and Glasner A, Society for Research into Higher Education and Open University Press, Maidenhead, pp 41-53

• Winter R, Parker J and Ovens P (eds) (2003) The Patchwork Text: a radical re-assessment of coursework assignments, Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 40(2)

• Knight P (2000) The value of a programme-wide approach to assessment, Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 25(3), 237-251

Addendum

• Apply a similar process to analyse the effectiveness of all the methods that you use to support student learning!