Learning from the assessment practices of award-winning teachers

Learning from the assessment practices of award-winning

teachers

David Carless

APERA conference, HKIEd

19th November 2014

The University of Hong Kong

Overview

Features of ‘good’ assessment tasks Mirroring real-life uses of the disciplines Assessing participation effectively Implications for effective assessment

practice


Aims of paper

• To explore effective assessment practice in undergraduate education;

• Through critically analyzing the practices of award-winning teachers



Productive assessment task design

Developing student self-evaluative capacities

Student engagement with feedback

Learning-oriented assessment framework

Task design principles

• Valid and reliableValid and reliable• Fair and transparentFair and transparent• Encourage deep approaches to learningEncourage deep approaches to learning• Distribute student effort evenly across Distribute student effort evenly across

topics and weeks topics and weeks • Permit choice and flexibility Permit choice and flexibility • Be contextualised, authenticBe contextualised, authentic


Task design issues

• How many tasks for a module?

• What modes of task(s)?

• How much variety?

• What kind of sequence, linkages and coherence?


Assessment in History case

• First year foundation course: diverse cohort of 110 students.

Fieldwork report 30%

Participation 30%

- tutorial participation 15%

- ‘short written responses’ 15%

Individual Project 40% (draft 10%; final 30%)


Museum visit assignment

• Students visit a local museum of their own choice

• 1,000 word written report: To engage critically with discourses concerning how the past is represented


Teacher rationale

“It’s important to get them out of the classroom into the context so that they can see ways in which people look at the past …They go into the museum and are asked to critique the space. There is a list of guiding questions as a framework ...”.


Assessing participation

“I’ve moved towards the position that students would mainly see the relevance of what goes on in the class if it is assessed. I want classroom participation to be assessed and for students to feel they have a got a stake in what goes on”.


Tort Law case

First year 180+ students:

• Tests, examinations (80%)

• Reflective media diary (20%)

identifying and analyzing legal issues from local newspaper reports;

similar to portfolio: collecting, selecting, editing and analyzing material over time.


Students’ views of RMD

• “Learning from legal textbooks can be detached and irrelevant. RMD is effective at linking Law to our daily context”.

• “It makes you really think because the facts in the news are common situations not the study of Law. There is no guided answer, issues are often unclear and we have to produce our own analysis”.


Business case

Case, class and blog discussion (40%)• Classroom dialogue stimulates student

engagement; • Assessing participation orally and in writing

promotes active student involvement;• Tensions between the benefits for engagement

of assessed participation and the challenges of grading participation systematically and reliably.


Students’ views of blog

• “Having a grading allocation for it gives some life for the blog”.

• “The intensiveness of the blog discussion increases towards the end of the semester because blog participation counts for grades”.

• “The oral discussion and critique during the class can be a bit fierce. He includes a blog as part of the participation grade to accommodate students who feel a bit intimidated in class”.


Features of these task designs

• Variety of tasks

• Participation in ways of thinking in the discipline (McCune & Hounsell, 2005)

• Student choice/options/flexibility

• Assessing participation

• Attempts at integration and coherence, but some challenges ….


Implications


Competing priorities

• Fairness/reliability <-> promoting learning

• Variety <-> familiarity

• Innovation <-> conservatism

• Confidence <-> defensiveness

• Trust <-> accountability


Assessing participation

• From a QA perspective assessing participation appears risky or untrustworthy.

• Assessing participation encourages student engagement and active learning methods i.e. is learning-oriented assessment.

• Clearly defined contributions + well-designed criteria could enable assessing participation to form a useful part of an overall assessment design.


Good Assessment task design

• Resolves competing contingencies by focusing on promoting student learning;

• Facilitates persistent intellectual engagement;

• Mirrors real-life uses of the discipline;

• Permits some degree of student choice;

• Engineers in-class feedback dialogues in relation to tasks and work in progress.


THANK YOU


Learning from the assessment practices of award-winning teachers

Education

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