September 2009 — Volume 3, Issue 5

The problem with assessment, and how we might address it

Professor David Boud’s Senior Fellowship is examining student assessment for learning in and after courses.

Assessment is a contentious topic. It creates tensions for and between both staff and students. It is one of the most fraught and unsatisfying parts of their experience. There are two conflicting pressures. We are asked to fairly assess all learning outcomes to encourage students to study across the whole course. But, simultaneously, the ever tightening unit of resource and the need to process more students means we are pressed to reduce the number of assessments.

For students pressures are different. They want to minimise the amount of high-stakes assessment they undertake. But when confronted with tasks that ‘don’t count’ for grades they don’t put energy into them. They want feedback on their work, but they don’t want to be assessed! There is no easy resolution of these dilemmas and we are continually challenged by the decision about where to place most effort to achieve the best outcomes.

Discussions to resolve these tensions are complicated by the fact that we use one word — assessment — to represent two different ideas that contradict each other. The first use is for making judgements about final performance. This ‘assessment’ ends up as grades and contributes to student’s certification. This assessment stays with them no matter how much their work might subsequently change. The second use of ‘assessment’ is for providing useful information to students to help them learn more effectively. It is a necessary part of teaching — helping students know what they know and what they don’t know so they can identify what they need to do to develop their work. This assessment continually evolves as students learn.
Now, any given task typically has to meet two contradictory purposes. These contradictions will ensure that the student experience is never going to be as positive as we might wish.

It would be helpful to pretend that there was a simple solution. Unfortunately, this is not the case. We do have to find a way of enabling both purposes of assessment to be addressed because both are necessary, and they can’t be easily disentangled.

I suggest that useful progress can be made on two fronts. The first is to think more clearly about what we mean by assessment and the metaphors we use to describe it. This leads us to identify assessment more obviously as a process of judgement rather than one merely of measurement. The second is to end the absolute dominance that summative certification purposes have over the formative. This involves focusing assessment on learning for the longer term and following through on the implications of this in terms of the tasks students do.

What metaphors influence our thinking about assessment? Since the technical revolution in assessment in the 60s and 70s when the ideas and practices of scientific measurement taken from the field of psychometrics started to exert their influence, we have taken up the metaphors of ‘measurement’ and ‘testing’ to describe assessment. We treat assessment as if we are making some measurement of attributes of students. The terminology of reliability and validity are markers of this tradition.

This discourse traps us into thinking about assessment as if it were a technical matter: if only we could devise a better instrument, our troubles would end! This view obscures both the structure of the discipline and the process of learning. Instead, we need to think of assessment as a relational process. It is one fundamentally about judgement. It is about making judgements about what students can do in areas that are of particular significance for the course. More importantly, as far as learning is concerned, it is about students being able to make judgements about the quality of their own work. We should, I suggest, strengthen thinking and talking about assessment as a process of making judgements about the quality of work.

This enables us to encompass both the idea that staff have ultimately to make judgements for purposes of certification, and also the idea that assessment is about informing the judgements of students about what they can do, and in particular how they can do it well. Assessment tasks that enable students to calibrate their own judgements of quality are ones we should be seeking to create. This means that all tasks should be designed to provide students with specific information about how they are doing in ways that help refine their judgement. Assessment tasks necessarily become learning tasks as well. And there is no reason why all assessment tasks, except a very few that occur at the final stage of a course should not be designed to foster this calibration of judgement.

This is part of the important goal of orienting assessment towards learning for the longer term. It is not just about topping up a head full of facts. We need to design assessment tasks that enable judgements to be made about what students most need in order to be able to continue their learning. This involves thinking differently about the kinds of tasks we create. It involves focusing on the actual consequences of assessment tasks on what students do and how they learn. It also requires us to find out how students respond to the
tasks that are set.

Our challenge as the designers of assessment is to look to what students need to be able to do to sustain their learning beyond the course. What are these features? They vary between programs but they include: understanding key ideas and concepts, being able to monitor and plan their own learning, identifying standards to apply to their own work and developing the confidence to go beyond what is provided.

My Senior Fellowship has been concerned with raising these issues across universities with those who influence assessment policy and those who design assessments. It has led to the development of a website — www.assessmentfutures.com — that provides ideas and strategies for creating worthwhile assessment tasks that consider learning in the longer term. The website is not designed to provide a general introduction to assessment, or even assessment for learning, but to assist those who want to shift assessment practice in the direction of equipping students for learning beyond the course. Such an approach needs to encompass other assessment purposes, such as certification and helping with immediate learning, but it takes the view that every act of assessment should in some way contribute to building the capacity of a student to be an effective judge of learning—their own and that of others—and that we cannot afford to have assessment
dominated by grading as the risk of merely testing is too high.

www.assessmentfutures.com as a resource for university teachers provides:

• Ideas and strategies to browse and consider, but no prescriptions for what should be done.
• Ideas are potentially applicable across a wide range of disciplinary areas.
• Examples of how these ideas and strategies have been used and tested.
• Suggestions about how to adapt and extend these ideas to suit different subject matter and local circumstances.
• Ways of conceptualising assessment for longer term learning so that others can go beyond the
  examples provided.

The more than 40 different strategies for assessments tasks provided there are designed to stimulate and provoke readers to consider what might work in their own courses. They are grouped in eight areas that represent key areas for consideration. These are:

• Engaging students
• Authentic activities
• Students design assessments
• Integrative tasks
• Learning and judgement
• Modelling and practice
• Working with peers
• Giving and receiving feedback

While there are extensive illustrations from different disciplines the website requires more, so it provides a simple mechanism for anyone to offer their own examples and have them acknowledged.

The challenge we face as university teachers is that we are working at a point in time when assessment is changing rapidly and is under scrutiny as never before. We have the choice of whether to be defensive and use assessment primarily as a tool of accountability, or to recognise that such a view of assessment holds back the development of knowledge and skills and forces us to look rearwards when the real challenges are before us. Creating practitioners that can face the demands of our complex world, contribute productively and enhance the quality of life within it demands a rethinking of conventional views of assessment and a focus on assessment as capacity building. It requires us to focus on what we want to produce in higher education and how aspects of our present taken-for-granted practice are inhibiting it.

While the media will always be obsessed with grading, and we will need to defend our grading practices, university teachers as professionals need to attend to what is most important for the real business in which we are engaged. This is providing the circumstances in which students can develop understanding and capability and helping them build it with others. We need to equip students with what they need to continue their learning and the processes that enable them to know that they are doing it well. This means that assessment must be seen as an active contributor to learning, not a stick to drive it or a barrier to its achievement.

*Professor Boud is Professor of Adult Education within the Faculty of Education at the University of
Technology, Sydney. He has been involved in research and teaching development in adult, higher
and professional education for over 30 years and has contributed extensively to the literature.