Teaching and Assessing Soft Skills - MASS - Measuring and ...

Appropriate assessment at the individual level may lead to enhanced individual learning, in
part by signalling that what is being assessed is regarded as important. The signalling
function of assessment may be particularly important in situations where the assessment is
mandated by agencies outside the learner–instructor interface, since importance is
indicated both to learners and to their teachers. A corollary of this is that, where assessment
of particular attributes is not mandated, low importance is being signified.
Assessment also reveals individuals’ achievements and this may be useful information to
both individuals and potential employers, indicating areas of strength and weakness.
Aggregation of individual achievement can be used at the system level to monitor system
performance.
Others have described assessment purposes as assessment of and for learning (P. Black &
Wiliam, 1999) and assessment as learning (Earl, 2003). Of these approaches, assessment of
learning relates most closely to evaluating individual achievement. This may be done at the
end of a term or school year or at the end of compulsory schooling and may be used to
assign grades and to rank students for admission to further stages of education. When
appropriately aggregated, using multilevel methods, data on individual achievement can be
used to evaluate programs, schools and education systems. Programs such as the OECD’s
Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the International Association
for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) Trends in Mathematics and Science
Study (TIMSS) use data in this way to compare national education systems.
Assessment for learning is a process of seeking and interpreting evidence for use by learners
and their teachers to decide where the learners are in their learning, where they need to go
and how best to get there. This approach occurs typically within classrooms during a school
term or year, but it is also used, particularly in special education, to diagnose learning
difficulties and to prescribe learning programmes to remediate those learning difficulties.
Assessment as learning exhorts teachers to use assessment activities as opportunities for
learning as well as for making judgments about student’s understandings to inform teaching
processes and to direct individual learning for students. Others have proposed that all
classroom activities, including assessment tasks, should be opportunities for student
learning. In these cases, assessment tasks become learning tasks and the phrase ‘assessment
as learning’ becomes particularly apt.
Boud (1995, p. 38), having summarised a body of research on assessment, concluded that
much assessment is of those aspects of learning that are easy to assess, which leads to lowlevel
skills development. He cited Eisner (1993) who listed desirable attributes of assessment
as including:
• assessment should be authentic (real-world like);
• assessment should be process rather than results oriented;
• the act of assessment signals the importance of what is being assessed, so
assessment is a driver for learning; and assessment activities need to be seen by
students as worthwhile and interesting activities. (Boud, 1995, p. 40)
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