How Have You Successfully Used Assessment In Your Teaching Practices To Promote Student Learning

Student Assessment in Pedagogy and Learning

By Michael R. Fisher, Jr.

Much scholarship has focused on the importance of pupil cess in educational activity and learning in higher education. Student assessment is a disquisitional aspect of the educational activity and learning process. Whether teaching at the undergraduate or graduate level, information technology is important for instructors to strategically evaluate the effectiveness of their teaching past measuring the extent to which students in the classroom are learning the class material.

This educational activity guide addresses the following: 1) defines student assessment and why it is important, 2) identifies the forms and purposes of student cess in the teaching and learning procedure, 3) discusses methods in student assessment, and 4) makes an important distinction between cess and grading.

What is student cess and why is it Important?

In their handbook for course-based review and assessment, Martha L. A. Stassen et al. define cess as "the systematic collection and analysis of information to meliorate student learning." (Stassen et al., 2001, pg. 5) This definition captures the essential task of educatee assessment in the pedagogy and learning procedure. Student cess enables instructors to measure the effectiveness of their didactics by linking pupil performance to specific learning objectives. As a result, teachers are able to institutionalize effective instruction choices and revise ineffective ones in their education.

The measurement of student learning through assessment is important because it provides useful feedback to both instructors and students nigh the extent to which students are successfully meeting course learning objectives. In their volume Understanding by Design, Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe offer a framework for classroom educational activity—what they call "Backward Blueprint"—that emphasizes the critical role of assessment. For Wiggens and McTighe, assessment enables instructors to determine the metrics of measurement for pupil agreement of and proficiency in course learning objectives. They argue that assessment provides the evidence needed to document and validate that meaningful learning has occurred in the classroom. Assessment is and so vital in their pedagogical design that their arroyo "encourages teachers and curriculum planners to first 'think like an assessor' before designing specific units and lessons, and thus to consider up forepart how they will determine if students have attained the desired understandings." (Wiggins and McTighe, 2005, pg. 18)

For more on Wiggins and McTighe's "Backward Design" model, run across our Agreement by Design teaching guide.

Student cess as well buttresses critical cogitating teaching. Stephen Brookfield, in Becoming a Critically Cogitating Instructor, contends that critical reflection on one'southward pedagogy is an essential part of developing as an educator and enhancing the learning feel of students. Critical reflection on 1's pedagogy has a multitude of benefits for instructors, including the development of rationale for teaching practices. According to Brookfield, "A critically cogitating teacher is much better placed to communicate to colleagues and students (besides as to herself) the rationale behind her do. She works from a position of informed commitment." (Brookfield, 1995, pg. 17) Pupil assessment, then, not only enables teachers to measure the effectiveness of their teaching, but is besides useful in developing the rationale for pedagogical choices in the classroom.

Forms and Purposes of Student Assessment

At that place are mostly ii forms of pupil cess that are virtually oftentimes discussed in the scholarship of teaching and learning. The first, summative assessment, is assessment that is implemented at the end of the course of written report. Its primary purpose is to produce a measure that "sums up" student learning. Summative assessment is comprehensive in nature and is fundamentally concerned with learning outcomes. While summative assessment is often useful to provide information about patterns of student accomplishment, it does so without providing the opportunity for students to reverberate on and demonstrate growth in identified areas for improvement and does not provide an artery for the teacher to modify teaching strategy during the didactics and learning process. (Maki, 2002) Examples of summative cess include comprehensive terminal exams or papers.

The second course, formative assessment, involves the evaluation of pupil learning over the course of time. Its fundamental purpose is to gauge students' level of achievement in guild to enhance educatee learning during the learning process. Past interpreting students' functioning through formative cess and sharing the results with them, instructors help students to "empathize their strengths and weaknesses and to reflect on how they need to improve over the course of their remaining studies." (Maki, 2002, pg. 11) Pat Hutchings refers to this form of assessment as assessment behind outcomes. She states, "the hope of assessment—mandated or otherwise—is improved student learning, and improvement requires attention not just to final results but also to how results occur. Cess behind outcomes means looking more carefully at the process and conditions that pb to the learning we care about…" (Hutchings, 1992, pg. 6, original emphasis). Formative assessment includes course work—where students receive feedback that identifies strengths, weaknesses, and other things to keep in mind for future assignments—discussions between instructors and students, and end-of-unit examinations that provide an opportunity for students to identify of import areas for necessary growth and development for themselves. (Brownish and Knight, 1994)

Information technology is important to recognize that both summative and formative assessment indicate the purpose of assessment, non the method. Different methods of assessment (discussed in the next department) can either be summative or determinative in orientation depending on how the instructor implements them. Sally Chocolate-brown and Peter Knight in their book, Assessing Learners in Higher Teaching, circumspection against a conflation of the purposes of cess its method. "Often the error is made of assuming that it is the method which is summative or formative, and not the purpose. This, we propose, is a serious mistake because it turns the assessor's attention away from the crucial upshot of feedback." (Chocolate-brown and Knight, 1994, pg. 17) If an teacher believes that a particular method is formative, he or she may fall into the trap of using the method without taking the requisite time to review the implications of the feedback with students. In such cases, the method in question effectively functions equally a course of summative cess despite the instructor's intentions. (Dark-brown and Knight, 1994) Indeed, feedback and discussion is the disquisitional factor that distinguishes between formative and summative assessment.

Methods in Student Assessment

Beneath are a few common methods of cess identified by Chocolate-brown and Knight that can be implemented in the classroom.[1] Information technology should be noted that these methods piece of work best when learning objectives have been identified, shared, and conspicuously articulated to students.

Self-Assessment

The goal of implementing self-cess in a course is to enable students to develop their own judgement. In self-cess students are expected to assess both procedure and product of their learning. While the cess of the production is often the task of the teacher, implementing student assessment in the classroom encourages students to evaluate their own work as well as the procedure that led them to the last upshot. Moreover, self-assessment facilitates a sense of ownership of 1's learning and can atomic number 82 to greater investment by the pupil. It enables students to develop transferable skills in other areas of learning that involve grouping projects and teamwork, disquisitional thinking and trouble-solving, as well as leadership roles in the teaching and learning process.

Things to Keep in Listen about Self-Assessment

Self-assessment is different from self-grading. According to Brownish and Knight, "Self-assessment involves the use of evaluative processes in which judgement is involved, where cocky-grading is the marking of i's own work against a set of criteria and potential outcomes provided by a third person, usually the [instructor]." (Pg. 52)
Students may initially resist attempts to involve them in the assessment process. This is usually due to insecurities or lack of conviction in their ability to considerately evaluate their own work. Brown and Knight notation, however, that when students are asked to evaluate their work, frequently student-adamant outcomes are very similar to those of instructors, particularly when the criteria and expectations have been made explicit in advance.
Methods of self-assessment vary widely and tin be as eclectic as the teacher. Common forms of cocky-assessment include the portfolio, reflection logs, instructor-student interviews, learner diaries and dialog journals, and the like.

Peer Assessment

Peer assessment is a type of collaborative learning technique where students evaluate the work of their peers and have their own evaluated by peers. This dimension of assessment is significantly grounded in theoretical approaches to active learning and adult learning. Like self-cess, peer assessment gives learners ownership of learning and focuses on the process of learning as students are able to "share with one another the experiences that they have undertaken." (Brown and Knight, 1994, pg. 52)

Things to Keep in Mind nigh Peer Assessment

Students tin can employ peer cess every bit a tactic of animosity or disharmonize with other students past giving unmerited low evaluations. Conversely, students tin also provide overly favorable evaluations of their friends.
Students can occasionally use unsophisticated judgements to their peers. For instance, students who are boisterous and loquacious may receive higher grades than those who are quieter, reserved, and shy.
Instructors should implement systems of evaluation in order to ensure valid peer assessment is based on evidence and identifiable criteria.

Essays

According to Euan S. Henderson, essays brand two important contributions to learning and assessment: the development of skills and the cultivation of a learning style. (Henderson, 1980) Essays are a common form of writing assignment in courses and can be either a summative or formative form of assessment depending on how the instructor utilizes them in the classroom.

Things to Keep in Mind about Essays

A common challenge of the essay is that students can use them simply to regurgitate rather than analyze and synthesize information to make arguments.
Instructors usually presume that students know how to write essays and can encounter disappointment or frustration when they discover that this is not the case for some students. For this reason, information technology is important for instructors to brand their expectations clear and be prepared to aid or expose students to resources that will raise their writing skills.

Exams and time-constrained, individual assessment

Examinations take traditionally been viewed as a gold standard of cess in education, peculiarly in university settings. Like essays they tin can be summative or determinative forms of cess.

Things to Go along in Heed about Exams

Exams can make significant demands on students' factual knowledge and can have the side-consequence of encouraging cramming and surface learning. On the other hand, they can besides facilitate student demonstration of deep learning if essay questions or topics are accordingly selected. Dissimilar formats include in-class tests, open-volume, take-home exams and the like.
In the procedure of designing an examination, instructors should consider the post-obit questions. What are the learning objectives that the exam seeks to evaluate? Have students been fairly prepared to meet examination expectations? What are the skills and abilities that students need to do well? How will this exam be utilized to raise the student learning procedure?

As Chocolate-brown and Knight assert, utilizing multiple methods of assessment, including more than than ane assessor, improves the reliability of data. Nevertheless, a primary claiming to the multiple methods approach is how to weigh the scores produced by multiple methods of assessment. When particular methods produce college range of marks than others, instructors can potentially misinterpret their assessment of overall student performance. When multiple methods produce different messages about the same student, instructors should be mindful that the methods are likely assessing dissimilar forms of accomplishment. (Brown and Knight, 1994).

For additional methods of cess not listed here, see "Assessment on the Page" and "Assessment Off the Page" in Assessing Learners in Higher Education.

In addition to the diverse methods of assessment listed to a higher place, classroom assessment techniques likewise provide a useful way to evaluate student agreement of course material in the education and learning process. For more on these, see our Classroom Assessment Techniques teaching guide.

Cess is More than Grading

Instructors ofttimes conflate cess with grading. This is a error. It must be understood that student assessment is more than than just grading. Recall that assessment links student performance to specific learning objectives in order to provide useful data to instructors and students about pupil accomplishment. Traditional grading on the other hand, co-ordinate to Stassen et al. does not provide the level of detailed and specific information essential to link student operation with improvement. "Considering grades don't tell you about student performance on private (or specific) learning goals or outcomes, they provide little information on the overall success of your course in helping students to reach the specific and singled-out learning objectives of interest." (Stassen et al., 2001, pg. 6) Instructors, therefore, must always remember that grading is an attribute of student assessment only does not institute its totality.

Teaching Guides Related to Student Assessment

Beneath is a list of other CFT didactics guides that supplement this one. They include:

Agile Learning
An Introduction to Lecturing
Beyond the Essay: Making Pupil Thinking Visible in the Humanities
Blossom'southward Taxonomy
How People Learn
Syllabus Structure

References and Additional Resources

This instruction guide draws upon a number of resources listed below. These sources should evidence useful for instructors seeking to enhance their pedagogy and effectiveness every bit teachers.

Angelo, Thomas A., and Thousand. Patricia Cross. Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for
College Teachers. 2^nd edition. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1993. Print.

Brookfield, Stephen D. Condign a Critically Reflective Teacher. San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass, 1995. Print.

Brown, Sally, and Peter Knight. Assessing Learners in Higher Education. one edition. London ;
Philadelphia: Routledge, 1998. Print.

Cameron, Jeanne et al. "Assessment as Critical Praxis: A Community Higher Experience."
Pedagogy Sociology 30.4 (2002): 414–429. JSTOR. Web.

Gibbs, Graham and Claire Simpson. "Conditions nether which Assessment Supports Student Learning. Learning and Teaching in Higher Didactics i (2004): iii-31.

Henderson, Euan S. "The Essay in Continuous Assessment." Studies in Higher Didactics 5.2 (1980): 197–203. Taylor and Francis+NEJM. Web.

Maki, Peggy 50. "Developing an Assessment Program to Acquire most Student Learning." The Journal of Bookish Librarianship 28.1 (2002): 8–xiii. ScienceDirect. Web. The Journal of Academic Librarianship.

Sharkey, Stephen, and William Due south. Johnson. Assessing Undergraduate Learning in Sociology. ASA Pedagogy Resource Eye, 1992. Print.

Wiggins, Grant, and Jay McTighe. Understanding Past Pattern. 2nd Expanded edition. Alexandria, VA: Assn. for Supervision & Curriculum Development, 2005. Print.

[1] Chocolate-brown and Night talk over the start two in their chapter entitled "Dimensions of Assessment." All the same, because this chapter begins the 2nd part of the book that outlines assessment methods, I have complanate the two under the category of methods for the purposes of continuity.