Abstracts - Earli

with congruent assessment methods. Results of the paired sampled t-tests indicated that studentsindeed do change their perceptions of assessment demands towards more assessment of deeplearning skills. However, the results also indicated that students did not change their approach tolearning towards a more deep approach. On the contrary, students seem to develop more surfaceapproaches to learning during the course. Correlational analyses indicated that only changes ofperceptions of assessment demands towards more surface skills are significantly related to changesin approaches to learning, towards a more surface approach to learning. The results point us to thecomplexity of the relationship between the learning-assessment environment, the students’perceptions of assessment demands, and students’ approaches to learning.Students’ perceptions of traditional assessment in relation to their study-results in a constructivistlearning environmentGerard van de Watering, Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, NetherlandsDavid Gijbels, University of Antwerp, BelgiumJanine van der Rijt, University of Maastricht, NetherlandsFilip Dochy, University of Leuven, BelgiumIn the present study students’ perceptions of assessment are topic of research. Two questions arecentral in this study: (1) How do students perceive the ‘traditional’ assessment in the constructivistlearning environment (i.e. the cognitive processes assessed in the traditional assessment)? (2) Inwhat way are students’ perceptions of assessment related to their assessment results? Students’perceptions of assessment were measured by means of 15 questions from the dimension Cognitiveprocess of the Assessment Preference Inventory, (Birenbaum, 1994). Students’ assessment resultswere measured by means of their final exam, which consisted of both multiple-choice and openendedquestions. The constructivist learning environment used in this study concerned problembasedlearning (PBL). 208 first-year Law students following a PBL-course on the topic of publiclaw participated in the study. Results were analysed by means of descriptive statistics for themeasures used in the present study and analysis of variance were conducted to probe into therelationships between students’ assessment preferences and their study results. Results showed thatstudents perceived their assessment primarily an a measurement consisting of comprehension- andapplication-based questions that required the drawing of conclusions, problem solving, analysis,interpretation and critical thinking. The measurement was also considered, secondarily, as ameasurement of reproduction based questions. Despite this, there was a clear correspondencebetween the intended level of cognitive processes and the perceived level of processes in theassessment in only 40 % of the cases. Though students with a matching perception scored slightlybetter on the assessment of outcomes compared to students with a misperception, the differenceswere marginal and not significant. Additional interviews with students about the assessmentrevealed some insights in how students identify these questions and how they (do not) cope with it.Several explanations are discussed in the paper.Students’ perceptions of the assessment practice and their approaches to learning in a portfolioassessment contextMien Segers, University of Leiden, NetherlandsDavid Gijbels, University of Antwerp, BelgiumMarieke Thurlings, University of Leiden, NetherlandsThere is a widespread claim that assessment steers learning. A few empirical studies indicate thatstudents’ perceptions of the assessment demands are related to their learning approaches, howevernot always in the expected direction. In order to gain more insight into the elements of the– 487 –