Using Assessment for Learning and Learning from Assessment

Innovation in assessment is no longer an option in higher education in Britain if we examine the aims and the claims that are being made. From the Dearing Report to our module guides, we claim to wish to support independent and life-long learning, put the students at the heart of the learning process and to help students take responsibility for their own learning. This cannot be done without including students in mainstream summative assessment and without reconciling the contradictions that currently contribute to impeding the students this access. This article will look briefly at the aims of higher education, provide an overview of current thinking on student learning and formative assessment as a framework for offering one possible practical solution to the problem. This possible solution is Taras's (2001) version of student self-assessment which works within the theoretical framework of Sadler's (1989) theory of formative assessment and of what we know about student learning.     

Framing student evaluations of university learning and teaching: discursive strategies and textual outcomes

Evaluation in higher education is an evolving social practice; that is, it involves what people, institutions and broader systems do and say, how they do and say it, what they value, the effects of these practices and values, and how meanings are ascribed. The textual products (verbal, written, visual and gestural) that inform and are produced by, for and through evaluative practices are important, as they promulgate particular kinds of meanings and values in specific contexts. This paper reports on an exploratory study that sought to investigate, using discourse analysis, the types of evaluative practices that were ascribed value, and the student responses that ensued, in different evaluative instruments. Findings indicate that when a reflective approach is taken to evaluation, students’ responses are more considered, they interrogate their own engagement in the learning context and they are more likely to demonstrate reconstructive thought. These findings have implications for reframing evaluation as reflective learning.     

Towards a sociocognitive model of progression in spoken English

Current approaches to oral assessment of English in English secondary schools tend to concentrate more on ‘confidence’ and ‘participation’ than on the quality of children's thinking. This undermines the rich possibilities in classroom talk for cognitive development. Behavioural assessment approaches deny the essentially cognitive character of spoken English. This paper compares two brief representative extracts from a larger data‐set of students engaged in small group debate on the subject of abortion. One group of students are hindered in their discussion by an inability to conceptualize abstractly. It is suggested that a formative assessment approach based on a model of cognitive progression such as Vygotsky's could enable all students to develop as speakers by encouraging their teachers to focus more explicitly on the development of the quality of thinking. A sociocognitive framework for conceptual progression could guide teachers in their interpretation of peer debate in order to develop the quality of students' understanding and argument. Building on the work of Newman, Griffin and Cole, and Torrance and Pryor, further research should be conducted into the ways in which formative teacher–student and student–student assessment dialogue might enhance students' ability to think through talk.     

Assessment as an equity issue in higher education: comparing the perceptions of first year students, course coordinators, and academic leaders

Assessment practices that aim to promote both quality and equity may be compromised in a higher education market where students are consumers and grades the currency exchanged for measures of success. In such a climate, academics report feeling pressured to make course content and assessment less challenging in order to obtain positive student evaluations, and they may lose faith in university quality assurance processes that seem focused on ensuring student satisfaction with education as a product. To explore these issues from the perspectives of the main stakeholders in assessment, this paper investigates assessment perceptions of students, course coordinators, and faculty Associate Deans responsible for teaching and learning at The University of Queensland. The findings highlight differences in what these groups consider to be important assessment issues and differences in how they should be addressed. First year students are identified as a disadvantaged group due to perceptions of the role of feedback and formative assessment that may be influenced by their secondary school assessment experiences.     

Quantitative skills as a graduate learning outcome: exploring students’ evaluative expertise

In the biosciences, quantitative skills are an essential graduate learning outcome. Efforts to evidence student attainment at the whole of degree programme level are rare and making sense of such data is complex. We draw on assessment theories from Sadler (evaluative expertise) and Boud (sustainable assessment) to interpret final-year bioscience students’ responses to an assessment task comprised of quantitative reasoning questions across 10 mathematical and statistical topics. The question guiding the study was: do final year science students graduate knowing the quantitative skills that they have, and knowing the quantitative skills that they do not have? Confidence indicators for the 10 topics gathered students’ perceptions of their quantitative skills. Students were assigned to one of four categories: high performance-high confidence; low performance-low confidence; high performance-low confidence; or low performance-high confidence – with those in the first two categories demonstrating evaluative expertise. Results showed the majority of students effectively evaluated their quantitative skills as low performance-low confidence. We argue that the application of evaluative expertise to make sense of this graduate learning outcome can further the debate on how assuring graduate learning outcomes can enhance student learning.     

Beyond the comfort zone: A curriculum and assessment “immersion” experience in graduate early childhood teacher education

Abstract

A graduate course in Early Childhood Education assessment which combines coursework and a practicum with young children is designed and implemented using constructivist principles and practice. Teacher education is more effective when field work and coursework are combined, and when students are able to apply what they learn in class to real life experiences with young children [Journal of Early Childhood Teacher Education 21 (1) (2000) 65], learning is enhanced. This course was constructed in a way that incorporated theory, application, reflection, and reconstruction, allowing students an opportunity to rethink their teaching practice through the experience of an early childhood practicum. The key components of the model — the components that are thought to most effectively help students to apply theory to practice, change some of their ways of thinking about teaching and learning are the following: the relationship of the coursework to the setting, continuity from previous courses, the laboratory school environment, the intensive faculty involvement, the co‐constructivist, collaborative nature of the faculty team, the collaborative nature of student work, the use of the three curriculum models, the use of embedded assessment, formative nature of the assessment, informed teaching (on‐going use of student feedback), the tools provided to student that assist in the process, and the practical hands‐on assessment techniques.

Changing students’ ways of thinking about the teaching, learning and assessment process is considered a vital part of the course. [Journal of Early Childhood Teacher Education 17(1) (Marshall, 1996) 43] has identified constructivist principles to guide teacher education. She believes that students must experience first‐hand those behaviors that she hopes they would exhibit in their own teaching (Rand, 1999, p. 126). It is through the processes of the course that graduate students are challenged to experience the implementation of emergent curriculum, examine their own beliefs in relation to their practice, articulate why they do what they do and see how classroom assessment strategies help to support meaningful teaching and learning. Furthermore, collaborative practice is considered an important factor that encourages and facilitates reflection, supports a more multi‐dimensional view of teaching and assessing young children, and enables students to listen and observe more effectively and look for the impact of children making choices. Through participation in this course, students became more aware of the impact their view of children and respect for children has on their ability to implement effective and appropriate assessment practices in the classroom. Students gained more of a conceptual understanding of the role of assessment in informed teaching, and were better able to meet individual children's instructional needs.

Finlly, students learned how to use tools inquiry, collaboration and reflection that are likely to assist them in future personal professional growth.     

Exploring pre-service science teachers’ pedagogical capacity for formative assessment through analyses of student answers

Background: There has been an increasing emphasis on empowering pre-service and in-service science teachers to attend student reasoning and use formative assessments to guide student learning in recent years. Purpose: The purpose of this study was to explore pre-service science teachers’ pedagogical capacity for formative assessment. Sample: This study took place in Turkey. The participants include 53 pre-service science teachers in their final year of schooling. All but two of the participants are female. Design and methods: We used a mixed-methods methodology in pursing this inquiry. Participants analyzed 28 responses to seven two-tiered questions given by four students of different ability levels. We explored their ability to identify the strengths and weaknesses in students’ answers. We paid particular attention to the things that the pre-service science teachers noticed in students’ explanations, the types of inferences they made about students’ conceptual understanding, and the affordances of pedagogical decisions they made. Results: The results show that the majority of participants made an evaluative judgment (i.e. the answer is correct or incorrect) in their analyses of students’ answers. Similarly, the majority of the participants recognized the type of mistake that the students made. However, they failed to successfully elaborate on fallacies, limitations, or strengths in student reasoning. We also asked the participants to make pedagogical decisions related to what needs to be done next in order to help the students to achieve academic objectives. Results show that 8% of the recommended instructional strategies were of no affordance, 64% of low-affordance, and 28% were of high affordance in terms of helping students achieve the academic objectives. Conclusion: If our goal is to improve pre-service science teachers’ noticing skills, and the affordance of feedback that they provide, engaging them in activities that asks them to attend to students’ ideas and reasoning may be useful.     

Facilitating Student Learning,the Assessment of Learning,and Curricular Improvement Through a Graduate Social Work Integrative Seminar

Social work programs undertake to educate competent professionals and to promote critical thinking among students who are expected to become lifelong learners. In addition, programs are called on to develop reliable and valid measures for assessing student learning outcomes and to use assessment results to reflect upon and strengthen curriculum. This study explores the use of a graduate integrative seminar to accomplish these goals. The authors describe the learning and assessment processes of the seminar. The authors used a mixed-method research design to analyze data from students over a 3-year period regarding the effectiveness of the seminar as well as from graduate faculty regarding student achievement of curricular objectives. Results indicate that formative assessment processes promote student learning in a manner that mobilizes students to strive for excellence, and that an embedded measure of learning outcomes in the form of a final integrative project may serve as a rigorous assessment tool.     

Students’ Interpretation of Formative Assessment Feedback: Three Claims for Why We Know So Little About Something So Important

If K‐12 students are to be fully integrated as active participants in their own learning, understanding how they interpret formative assessment feedback is needed. The objective of this article is to advance three claims about why teachers and assessment scholars/specialists may have little understanding of students’ interpretation of formative assessment feedback. The three claims are as follows. First, there is little systematic research of K‐12 students’ interpretations of feedback. Systematic research requires gathering substantive evidence of students’ cognitive and emotional processes using psychological methods and tools. Second, there is an overemphasis on the external assessment process at the expense of uncovering learners’ internal reasoning and emotional processes. This overemphasis may be due to vestiges of behavioral approaches and lack of training in social cognitive methods. Third, there are psychological tools such as the clinical interview, pioneered by Piaget and used by psychologists to “enter the child's mind,” which may be helpful in uncovering students’ interpretation of feedback and associated behavioral responses. If the purpose of formative assessment is to change student learning, and feedback is delivered as a conduit to help with this long‐term change, understanding students’ interpretation of feedback plays a central role in the validity of the process.     

试论形成性评价及其对大学英语教学与测试的启示

形成性评价在教学过程中对学生的学习情况进行评价，为教师与学生提供反馈，评价中收集到的信息用于调整教学以满足学生需求，提高教学质量。形成性评价如果使用得当，能显著改善教学效果，并帮助学生成为自主高效的学习者。从大学英语教学与测试中存在的问题和发展的趋势来看，如果能将形成性评价用于大学英语课堂，对大学英语教学与测试的发展能起积极的促进作用。本文对国内外有关形成性评价概念、价值和使用等方面的文献作了较充分的述评，并初步探讨了形成性评价对大学英语教学与测试发展的启示。     

A structural model of perceived academic,personal, and vocational gains related to college student responsibility

The purpose of this paper was to develop and test a model of college gains using Pace's conceptual theory of student responsibility and perceived college environment as a guide. An analysis of student responses at 11 selected institutions was accomplished using EQS, a covariance structure modeling technique. Findings suggest that the principal determinant of student gains is the effort that students put into their academic and social experiences. This finding held for gains in general education, personal growth, and vocational preparedness. Results suggest that what students do while at college is more important in defining what is accomplished than their backgrounds. Student involvement is enhanced by the perception that the college provides a generally supportive and facilitative environment. Observed effects of major and gender are complex and suggest the importance of the microenvironment in college outcomes research. While these variables are important in understanding the process by which gains are made, they are unimportant in accounting for gains.     

Investigating peer-assessment strategies for mathematics pre-service teacher learning on formative assessment

Formative assessment practices for secondary mathematics have been advocated as valuable for students, but difficult for teachers to learn. There have been calls in the literature to increase the emphasis on formative assessment in mathematics teacher preparation courses. This study explored the use of peer-assessment strategies for helping pre-service secondary mathematics teachers (PSTs) cultivate formative assessment principles and practices for assessing school students. Twenty-seven PSTs participated in a peer-assessment cycle comprised of: sourcing a rich mathematics task; constructing an assessment rubric for it; and collecting and analysing a selection of secondary student responses to the task. Each PST then provided written and verbal feedback to a peer on his/her rubric and student solution assessments. We draw on theoretical conceptions of Teacher Assessment Literacy in Practice to characterize the PSTs’ perceptions of their experience of formative assessment processes for learning to assess school students, in terms of cognitive and affective dimensions of their conceptions of assessment. The cohort evidenced a wide range of levels of confidence with the various aspects of formative assessment practices but on average less confidence in assessing school student task responses themselves than in assessing peer work. In addition to highlighting specific changes to different types of assessment knowledge, the PSTs also evidenced an awareness of shifts in their attitudes, in coming to view student task responses with more appreciation and humility.

     

Feed-forward assessment,exemplars and peer marking: evidence of efficacy

The paper reports the findings of evaluative research that attempted to rigorously assess the efficacy of a feed-forward, formative assessment intervention. The aim was to improve participants’ conceptions of quality, and hence improve the quality of a complex piece of summative assessment, by asking them to mark exemplars produced by former students. Feed-forward assessment has theoretical support in the literature, but empirical confirmation has been slight. Research findings were encouraging. A statistical model incorporating feed-forward was developed which accounted for a large effect in the improvement of results for the summative item. Importantly, there was improvement across student ability levels. Students, in the main, made accurate judgements about different levels of exemplar quality, although they had some difficulty discerning different pathways to high-quality products. Qualitative analysis indicated improved student conceptions of coherence and integration in the summative piece.     

Commentary: Evaluating the Validity of Formative and Interim Assessment

In many school districts, the pressure to raise test scores has created overnight celebrity status for formative assessment. Its powers to raise student achievement have been touted, however, without attending to the research on which these claims were based. Sociocultural learning theory provides theoretical grounding for understanding how formative assessment works to increase student learning. The articles in this special issue bring us back to underlying first principles by offering separate validity frameworks for evaluating formative assessment (Nichols, Meyers, & Burling) and newly-invented interim assessments (Perie, Marion, & Gong). The article by Heritage, Kim, Vendlinski, and Herman then offers the most important insight of all; that is, formative assessment is of little use if teachers don't know what to do when students are unable to grasp an important concept. While it is true that validity investigations are needed, I argue that the validity research that will tell us the most—about how formative assessment can be used to improve student learning—must be embedded in rich curriculum and must at the same time attempt to foster instructional practices consistent with learning research.     

Implementation and student perceptions of e-assessment in a Chemical Engineering module

This paper describes work carried out at the Department of Chemical Engineering at UCL into the use of e-assessment in a second year module and, in particular, the student perceptions of this mode of assessment. Three quizzes were implemented in Moodle, the first two as formative assessment and the final quiz as summative assessment. The results were very encouraging and practically all students engaged with the process. An online survey was delivered to all students after the module, which showed that the students felt that e-assessment added value to their learning and they would like to see it implemented in other modules. The quizzes were intended to be mainly beneficial to the weaker students as it gave them an opportunity to go over key aspects of the material in their own time. Interestingly, the stronger students were even more in favour of e-learning than the weaker students, for whom the quizzes were originally designed.     

Formatives Assessment im Leseunterricht der Grundschule – Implementation und Wirksamkeit eines modularen,materialgestützten Konzepts

Definitions of formative assessment include assessment, feedback and differentiated instruction as key components. We investigated the effects of prepared teaching materials designed to support teachers using learning progress assessment (LPA) to give feedback and adapt differentiated instruction. We also examined to what extend this modular approach can be implemented in regular reading lessons in third grade. In a three-group design all teachers (N?=?44, N?=?945 students) employed a computer-based LPA tool, while teachers in two conditions additionally received prepared feedback material (FB) or feedback and reading instruction material (FB+FM), to support the implementation of the different components of formative assessment. Over the course of one schoolyear, we assessed the implementation outcomes using questionnaires as well as students’ reading achievement and further student outcomes. While acceptability is high, teacher ratings of feasibility are low. In comparison to the LPA group, the additional support in form of prepared materials had no effects on student outcomes. Results are discussed regarding the question of how teachers can optimally be supported in using formative assessment.     

Public Administration Education in Britain

Abstract

Students, quality assessment bodies established by the Government to determine output‐related funding, and other groups in society are placing more and more pressure on tertiary institutions to improve the quality of their teaching practices. Some institutions are responding to this pressure by implementing student‐centred approaches to teaching, where the students and course leaders become equal partners in determining the course work assessment process, teaching methods and learning outcomes. To a certain extent the learning outcomes are set by the Government's quality assessment bodies. However the course work assessment process, teaching methods and interpretation of these pre‐specified learning outcomes, can still be negotiated with the students in a student‐centred manner.

Many disciplines in tertiary institutions currently face, or can expect to face in the future, extremely large class sizes. Many argue that it is not possible to implement a student‐centred approach in the large class setting. Indeed, they suggest that there is a negative relationship between class size and the quality of the learning experience.

This paper examines the application of a student‐centred approach to a final year business studies course involving over 100 students completing their BSc (Hons). A survey of the students at the end of the year indicated that, relative to the other courses being taken by the students, this course achieved an unusual treble: higher levels of student learning, higher student workload, and yet, higher levels of student enjoyment. These results would tend to dispel the myth that student‐centred approaches can only be successful in the smaller class setting.     

形成性评价在英语教学论课堂教学中的运用

为适应当前大学专业英语教学,传统的终结性评价正逐渐被形成性评价所取代。形成性评价的广泛应用能使教师和学生及时地获得反馈信息,调整教学进程,提高教学质量,增强学生的学习兴趣,促进学生的全面发展。