Working together to improve student learning

What do our students learn? Assessing Assessment

Objective:

In Learning to Teach in Higher Education, Paul Ramsden says;

We couldn't agree more. This is perhaps one of the most difficult aspects of our work to open up to another's scrutiny. In this exercise the focus is on your student's perceptions of the assessment task, the way they go about completing it, the learning they do as a result and what learning the assessment measures. The questions from your partner will assist you reflect on your own intentions in relation to your design of the task and your assessment of its completion, through the questions of your peer. Consideration of student work (the learning outcome) is yet another rich source of information.

Gathering the data

Interviewing each other's students

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Asking the students to learn what your students say about their experience of assessment in your subject.

The scholarship of teaching is directed to learning how to improve student learning. If we are to improve student learning we need to know how our students experience learning as well as assessing what they have learnt. One way to do this is to ask our students about their learning. We can question our student ourselves and then share the results with each other or we can ask each other's students and then share the results. Students will probably tell another teacher something different to what they would say to us, it is useful to consider both as sources. Whichever way we obtain the information the main part of the task is to work together to make sense of what our students say. There is a considerable body of literature available to help us to do that, see below.

The picture that our students paint for us about their learning experience is the context in which we examine what we intend and what we do.

Below is a suggested set of questions around which to structure your interview. The questions are not mandatory and please add in any additional questions that you think may be relevant. Don't hesitate to probe a response for more information or greater clarity. You may wish to record the interviews as this will give you the opportunity to listen to the interview again as you develop a memo about what you learnt and prepare for the next activity.

See General Advice for Interviewing prepared as advice for interviewing students in the Student Learning unit in Module 1 for more details in interview technique. (Not yet available on web site)

• How do you go about preparing for (name the assessment task)?
• What did the task ask you to do?
• What was helpful in undertaking this assignment?
• What did you find difficult?
• How was the assignment/feedback helpful to your learning?
• What would you like to see improved?

Write up a memo about this interview to keep the information fresh in your mind, this will enable you to consider it in relation to the other sources of information you are gathering in relation to this issue.

Interviewing each other to understand intention in relation to assessment.

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Teaching Intention Interview Questions

• If you could begin by telling me something about the subject you are assessing?
• What is involved in this subject?
• What do you want students to know as a result of this subject
• What is the assessment task that you set for this subject?
• What do students have to do to achieve that?
• How do you help them to achieve that?
• How do you know if they have achieved that?
• Why do you assess in this way?
• What sorts of things determined designing the task in this way?
• How do you choose what aspects of a subject to assess?
• Why do you choose those aspects?
• How do you respond to the student's work?

Write up a memo about this interview to keep the information fresh in your mind and to enable you to consider it in relation to the other sources of information you are gathering in relation to this issue.

Looking at the outcome; Examining examples of student work

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Read through the student work before you read the assessment instruction

Based on your reading of the student work design the question or the task you think they were answering.

Write up a memo about your response to keep the information fresh in your mind and to enable you to consider it in relation to the other sources of information you are gathering in relation to this issue.

Reviewing teaching materials; Assessment Guidelines

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The guidelines that we prepare for our students are a formal expression of what we want our students to do. In reviewing these guidelines we are looking to determine what the student will believe they must do as a result of reading it, both the intended and unintended outcomes.

Do these guidelines contain

Basic information?

• Type of assessment, exam, project work, open book exam, essay, etc.
• Due dates for submission of work
• Faculty policy for obtaining special consideration, for late submission of work
• Explanation of plagiarism and its consequences
• Minimum size of the assignment
• Teacher's contact details
  

  Criteria on which the assignment will be assessed

• What is the student expected to demonstrate through this assignment?
• What will the teacher be looking for?
• What is the expectation in terms of reading and other research?
• Explanation as to relationship of task to overall subject learning objectives and learning outcomes.
• Directions for locating relevant resources.
• Are there choices for the student within the task?
• Are connections with the student's own experiences required within the task?
• Is there room for negotiation about the nature of the task?
• And finally, does the document have an encouraging tone?

Write up a memo about your response to keep the information fresh in your mind and to enable you to consider it in relation to the other sources of information you are gathering in relation to this issue.

Scrutinizing the evidence

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You now have developed considerable data about the assessment experiences of your students and your own intentions in relation to the tasks that you set.See Making Judgments: Taking Action. This is will provide you with some general information for dealing with the outcome of your data collection.

In addition to this advice and in specific response to this task, Inquiring into Assessment, you need to consider:

The student perspective

What did the students tell you about their experience of assessment?
What did they say about

• workload
• confidence in undertaking the work
• how they prepared for assessment
• learning levels in relation to the task
• amount of reading required
• level of satisfaction

The learning perspective

Referring again to record of student interview and to the work submitted by the students,

• What did the students learn as a result of undertaking the assessment?
• What learning did the students demonstrate in the work that they submitted?
• What learning were they required to demonstrate within the assessment?
• How successful were the students?

Learning to improve what we do

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• Read through your partner's notes about assessment in your subject.
• How are your perceptions similar, how are they different?
• Where does student satisfaction come from?
  What helps their learning?
• How can we improve on what we ask?
• How can we improve on what we do to
• What does the literature say?
• What can we do differently?

Together design new or modify the current assessment tasks so that they will enable the student to learn through the doing and be able to demonstrate their learning to the reader in the process.

Assessment References:

See unit on Assessment in Module One