Aligning teaching and assessment to curriculum objectives John Biggs

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Extended understanding, being able to gobeyond what has been taught, deal creativelywith new situations: Apply to novel contexts,hypothesize, reflect, generate.The first step in designing the curriculumobjectives, then, is to make clear what levels ofunderstanding we want from our students inwhat topics.Once we have done that, we need to decide howwe are going to get them to do it. Those verbs,and others that suit your own discipline,become the markers throughout the system.They need to be embedded in theteaching/learning activities, and in theassessment tasks. They keep us on track.Choosing teaching/learningactivities (TLAs)We usually take TLAs for granted. The defaultTLAs in many courses are lecture and tutorial:lecture to expound and package, and tutorial toclarify and extend. However, the verbs thesecontexts elicit are not necessarily high level ifthe student is not so inclined. Students can getaway with being passive, whereas high levellearning requires them to be active in theirlearning.There are many options for creatingappropriate learning contexts (Chapter 5, Biggs2003) but even the large class allows a widerange of relevant student activity – if only thelecturer stops talking now and then, andrequires students to question each other aboutjust taught content, to reflect, to swap notes,to do exercises, to self-test, and so on (seeChapter 6, op. cit.). Then of course there is arange of activities that can be scheduledoutside the classroom, especially but not onlyusing IT (Chapter 10, op cit.). In fact, problemsof resourcing conventional on campus teaching,and the changing nature of HE, are coming tobe blessings in disguise, forcing learning to takeplace outside the class, with group and peerteaching, independent learning and work-basedlearning, all of which are a rich source ofrelevant learning activities.Assessing students’ learning outcomesIt is no exaggeration to say that faultyassumptions and practices about assessment domore damage than any other single factor. AsRamsden (1992) puts it, the assessment is thecurriculum, as far as the students areconcerned. They’ll learn what they think they’llbe assessed on, not what’s in the curriculum, orwhat’s been ‘covered’ in class.The trick is, then, to make sure the assessmenttasks mirror what you intended them to learn.That pre-empts the sort of cynical gameplayingwe saw in our psychology undergraduate,above, with his ‘two pages of writing’.But there’s a much broader problem, whichmust be addressed full-on. The fact is, themost common assessment practices make suchalignment all but impossible.Two approaches to assessmentTwo approaches to assessment underlie currenteducational practice. The first is thetraditional model. We teach, then we test.Next, we order students along a quantitativescale, usually a percentage scale, which is doneby the familiar process of ‘marking’, and thenwe allocate grades. Grading can be carried outby stipulating arbitrary cut-off points: 75+becomes an A, 65 – 74, B, and so on. A commonalternative is to grade on the curve or to normreference.That is, the top 15 per cent, say, areawarded A; the next 25 per cent B, and so on.In either method of grading, the commonfeature is that the students’ performanceshave to be quantified. Quantification isachieved in one or both of two ways. First,knowledge is broken down into units that areclassified as correct or incorrect, and thecorrect units are added or averaged. Second, a
performance, such as an essay or a problemsolution, is reduced to independent components(such as content, style, originality, etc.), whichare then rated on separate rating scales, themaxima of which are frequently chosen to addup to 100. The final performance is thenassessed as the sum of the separate ratings. Itis then assumed that we have a clear,‘objective’ scale along which we can comparestudents’ performances.The second approach to assessment iscriterion-referenced. That is, the score anindividual obtains reflects how well theindividual meets preset criteria, those beingthe objectives of teaching. This is what I amtalking about here: alignment betweenobjectives and assessment. But before I dealwith this, let me outline some of the problemswith the traditional model.What’s wrong with the traditionalapproach to assessment?Underlying the quantitative approach toassessment is what Taylor (1994) calls the‘measurement model’, which derives fromindividual differences psychology. Psychologistswere concerned about how individuals differedfrom each other on fixed traits. They createdsophisticated test procedures, which relied onseveral assumptions. For example, traits arenormally distributed, and so therefore testscores should be too. Thus, an ability test isconstructed on the assumption that very feware really bright, most fall in the middle and afew really dull, in the familiar bell shape.Unfortunately, the educational fraternitypounced on psychometric-type tests, wateredthem down, and used them inappropriately inthe classroom.There are many problems with this approach.Underlying them all is that there is no essentialalignment between what outcomes are intended,what is taught, and what is assessed. Any quickand dirty test with a modicum of face validity(‘two pages of writing’, for instance) can beused to produce an ordering of students.Here are only some of the particular problems:1. Expressing performances as percentages isassumed to create a universal currencythat is equivalent across subjects areas,and across students. This assumption iscompletely unsustainable. How can 50% inEnglish be equivalent to 50% in History?How then can scores on these differentscales be averaged? Think about it.2. A high average in most components of acourse covers failure in other components.The reasoning here – that the studentclearly had the ability to pass, so an overallpass is justified – is also unsustainable. Thelogic of awarding a pass to a student on asection of the course in which that studenthas already failed is difficult to grasp.3. Tests should be unidimensional, and have ahigh test-retest reliability. Complexperformances are however notunidimensional, and teaching is supposed toproduce change in what is being measured,a change usually called ‘learning’. Measuringchange, using a model that assumes thatwhat is being measured is stable, seemssomewhat peculiar.4. The effects of quantitative assessments onstudent learning (‘backwash’) negative.Quantifying sends the wrong messages tostudents. For example: Ideas are equally important Individual trees are more importantthan the wood You can skip or slack on certain areas ifyou are doing well elsewhere Written tests make declarativeknowledge more important thanapplication Verbatim responses must gain somecredit Grading on the curve makes successand failure depend on uncontrollablefactors such as relative ability and luck
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Aligning teaching and assessment to curriculum objectives John Biggs

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