Assessment and learning: contradictory or complementary?

Abstract

There is probably more bad practice and ignorance of significant issues in the area of assessment than in any other aspect of higher education. This would not be so bad if it were not for the fact that the effects of bad practice are far more potent than they are for any aspect of teaching. Students can, with difficulty, escape from the effects of poor teaching, they cannot (by definition if they want to graduate) escape the effects of poor assessment. Assessment acts as a mechanism to control students that is far more pervasive and insidious than most staff would be prepared to acknowledge. It appears to conceal the deficiencies of teaching as much as it does to promote learning. If, as teachers and educational developers, we want to exert maximum leverage over change in higher education we must confront the ways in which assessment tends to undermine learning. I have been reinforced in my view of the importance of assessment considerations by the work of my former colleagues in the Professional Development Centre at the University of New South Wales. Sue Toohey teaches the subject on assessment in the postgraduate course for university teachers. At the beginning she asks them to write an autobiography focusing on their experiences of being assessed. The results of this are devastating and the students can’t stop themselves from referring to it in other classes. They emerge from the exercise saying to themselves that they must not treat their students in the same ways in which they were treated. It is clear from this that even successful, able and committed students—those who become university teachers—have been hurt by their experiences of assessment, time and time again, through school and through higher education. This hurt did not encourage them to persist and overcome adversity as some of our more intellectually muscular colleague might argue: it caused them to lose confidence, it dented their self-esteem and led them never to have anything to do with some subjects ever again. Now, some of these incidents were connected with abuses of power by teachers and could not be justified on any grounds, but others were artefacts of everyday assessment practices which we regard as perfectly normal. If assessment has such a profound effect on the successes of the system, how much greater must be the negative effects on their less academically accomplished peers? Interest in assessment in higher education has been at a low point for about a decade and it has only been in the 1990s that it has started to pick up again. I have been surprised, in coming back to it after a long absence, that it is not the measurement-driven and rather stagnant area that I remembered it to be, but it is now at the heart of considerations of teaching and learning. It actually always was at the heart of such matters, but in the hands of assessment specialists it was easy to gain the impression that it required a knowledge of particular statistical techniques and test-construction that didn’t have much relationship to acts of learning. The dominant discourse in the literature referred to reliability, validity, discrimination (as a desirable feature, of course!) and difficulty. That has now changed dramatically. Assessment is back, centre-stage, and is of wide interest and concern. The assessment load created by increasing numbers of students and the shift in thinking towards competency frameworks are but the most prominent of many pressures. This is not to say that discussions of teaching and learning are always central to discussions of assessment, but it does mean that we cannot possibly ignore assessment issues: assessment certainly aids or inhibits our endeavours in improving teaching and learning. A concept which became part of the assessment discourse and which influenced my earlier thinking was Michael Scriven’s (1967) distinction between formative evaluation (to improve) and summative evaluation (to decide). These terms were translated on this side of the Atlantic into formative and summative assessment and used to discuss the importance of making sufficient provision for feedback to students as distinct from marking or grading which did not provide useful information to them. At times, the discussion seemed to imply that it was