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

134 ❘
Teaching, supervising, learning
PURPOSES OF ASSESSMENT
The QAA revised code of practice for the assessment of students determines four main
purposes (classifications and additional comments by the author are indicated in italics):
1 Pedagogy: promoting student learning by providing the student with feedback,
normally to help improve his or her performance (but also to determine what and how
students learn).
2 Measurement: evaluating student knowledge, understanding, abilities or skills.
3 Standardisation: providing a mark or grade that enables a student’s performance to
be established. The mark or grade may also be used to make progress decisions.
4 Certification: enabling the public (including employers) and higher education
providers to know that an individual has attained an appropriate level of achievement
that reflects the academic standards set by the awarding institution and agreed UK
norms, including the Framework for Higher Education Qualifications. This may
include demonstrating fitness to practise or meeting other professional requirements.
(QAA, 2006a: 4)
Inevitably, there is some overlap between these four purposes but there is also potential
for conflict, particularly when the need for certification, standardisation and measurement
makes flexibility and changing assessment practice for pedagogical reasons slow and
difficult.
PRINCIPLES OF ASSESSMENT DESIGN
It is now widely accepted that assessment tends to shape much of the learning that
students do (Brown et al., 1997), so if we want to change the way our students learn and
the content of what they learn, the most effective way is to change the way we assess
them. Birenbaum et al. (2005) argue persuasively for a paradigm shift in assessment
practices. Although their paper is concerned with assessment in schools, their arguments
apply equally to the university context for undergraduates and taught postgraduates.
One of the powerful points they make is that in spite of the advent of technology, most
education systems are still relying on an out-of-date information transmission model,
which means that the assessments do not address the needs of learners in our modern
complex and globalised societies. Authentic assessment which focuses on the development
of real-world skills, active construction of creative responses, and the integration
of a variety of skills into a holistic project has an additional benefit of designing out
opportunities for plagiarism.
Many current assessment systems do not allow learners to improve their own learning
because the assessments are ‘considered to be an endpoint instead of a beginning or a step
forward’ (Birenbaum et al., 2005: 3). This means that the assessment is summative (testing
what has been learned) and therefore tends to drive the teaching (teaching for the test).