A Handbook for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Enhancing academic and Practice

10
Assessing student
learning
Lin Norton
INTRODUCTION
Assessment is one of the most controversial issues in higher education today. Guidelines
and principles abound. The UK Professional Standards Framework for teaching and
supporting learning in higher education (2006) has ‘assessment and giving feedback to
learners’ as one of six areas of activity, and the UK Quality Assurance Agency (QAA,
2006a) has recently revised its section on assessing students in its code of practice. Few
topics create such divided opinions and raise such passions as assessment and yet, in
higher education, we still seem relatively bad at it. The National Student Survey (2006
and 2007) indicated that assessment and feedback were areas that students were least
satisfied with. In the recently published outcomes of their audit of 123 institutions, QAA
commented: ‘For a substantial number of institutions, further work in the development
of assessment arrangements was judged either advisable or desirable’ (QAA, 2006b: 13).
This is a serious indictment of a fundamental aspect of our professional work. This
chapter explores some of the reasons behind this current state of affairs by considering
some of the constraints that operate within universities and across the sector. Within this
wider framework, some principles and methods will be explored by considering the two
essential elements of assessing student learning: assessment design and feedback.
Assessment design is concerned with pedagogical philosophy, disciplinarity, models of
assessment and what we know about ways students learn. In other words, it is assessment
to influence learning. Assessment as feedback is focused more on practices to improve
student learning. A third major area in assessment is marking, which will be mentioned
relatively briefly, because the focus of the chapter will be on assessment for learning in
both undergraduate and taught Masters programmes rather than on assessment of
learning (Birenbaum et al., 2005).
Throughout the chapter, reference will be made to the relevant empirical and theoretical
literature on assessment using the perspective of the reflective practitioner (Campbell
and Norton, 2007). This involves examining our own beliefs about assessment and how
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