Topic 5: Alignment and Assessment

“Formal assessment is now so integral to mass education that any attempt to release education from the constrictions of assessment procedures would likely result in the collapse of the system itself” Jon Danver, University of Plymouth.

I have to admit that I’d not really appreciated how assessment is so crucial to the learning process before this course. As a visiting tutor this quote by Davis summed up how i’ve approached my teaching up to now.

“Only the course designers have a real understanding of how things fit together. New or part-time teachers, for instance, have to take the module outlines at face value and make sense of them in terms of their own professional experience.” 

It’s a complex subject so I decided to explore by starting with John Danver’s paper, he neatly puts it ‘assessment’ comes from the Latin root, assidere, meaning ‘to sit beside’ – in our case, ‘to sit beside the learner’ – observing, reflecting upon and commenting upon, what is done, how it is done and what is produced in the process of learning.” 

It might seem an obvious but  “to sit beside the learner” is core of what we do as tutors.  Danver helps by putting it into historical context, by saying that the need for assessment was due to competition in places and that employers needed to impose strict selection. As he says educators with their marking systems act as gatekeepers for entry into employment by the marks they give.

It struck me how complicated it is to attach a numerical score for assessment in an arts based subject compared to a subject like mathematics, technology, science and engineering etc. I’ve had little experience of setting learning outcomes or how to apply measurements, critical evaluation and interpretation. However it seems that in general the arts are assessed using both numerical scores / grades and these are usually accompanied by verbal reports and feedback. With arts subjects it has always struck me that this leaves the area of interpretation open to question, it’s hard as the report says to measure or quantify a process of learning. I also think it’s hard sometimes to separate personal taste when evaluating the work, with art being so subjective.

Raymond Briggs cynical statement ‘What and how students learn, depends to a major extent on how they think they will be assessed”. I immediately question whether students are strategically driven and what the impact is of quality classroom teaching?

I asked a full time tutor, why do we assess?

*Good testing ensures that objective-setting” assessment is aligned to the curriculum. *Assessment provides students with a “holistic’ gauge to the level of their achievement. *As educators, we learn through assessment: what was learnt/ understood and what was not. *Assessment is thought to be a key driver to learning, it provides students with incentive. * Assessment provides an “internal & external” accountable system of standards.* Self/Peer assessment develops confidence and self-reliance of students.*Grading criteria allows assessors to judge the depth of learning undertaken * Formative assessment allows “staged” learning, undertaken at the student’s own pace. *To identify students who apply learnt knowledge to new situations. She assessed her students using these 5 points 1) Analysis 2) Subject Matter 3) Technical Competence 4) PPD 5) Independent working and collaboration. Each of the 5 areas had detailed criteria for marking.

I read Davis report about learning outcomes and assessment as his report sets out to help new staff. It’s long but well written and he states that less than 43% of assessment of students are effective due to inconstancies in the clarity and use of the assessment criteria and their relationship to the learning outcomes. Davis talks about the lack of clarity in learning outcomes, however I think its often in tutorials, crits and feedback where students formulate their intentions and as tutors we have to try and encourage and help them understand what imagination, creativity and risk taking actually means. Its clear that students need to know what is expected of them in any given course or module, but I wonder if the more specific an outcome, the greater the constraint on the student. I feel with art and design students it’s not necessarily about literal interpretation of a learning outcome, for them it’s about being creative, exploring & discovering.

Davis says…..“If they are overly generic they become less meaningful and it is unclear how the outcomes and assessment criteria relate to each other. If they are overly specific it becomes difficult for judgments about performance to be meaningful.”

I discussed with the tutor about practical and interactive assessments which seem to motivate students and “arouse’ them when they explain or perform what they have learnt and they can assess one another at the same time. An example of this is the fact that she is asking her students to reflect on collaboration for instance, in a largely visual manner, cutting out the need for long-winded essay writing. She has inspired the students to perform and demonstrate what they have learnt which they prefer to more passive forms of assessment such as writing and talking in a tutorial what they know. She admits that performing this critical analysis in front of a client/ audience has extra merits.

To conclude, the easiest way for me to think about assessment is…. 1) letting the student knows what’s expected of them 2) as staff we have to delivery the content of the course 3) support the students work 4) and then judge their learning…..if only it was that simple!