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

Assessing student learning
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Assessment for learning places more emphasis on the formative, is integrated into the
curriculum and is context embedded and flexible.
In practical terms this means assessment design which focuses on learning outcomes
(see Chapter 4). Prosser and Trigwell (1999) use the term ‘high-quality learning outcomes’,
which they define as involving ‘an understanding that can be drawn upon in other and
new contexts’ (p.108). This is what is commonly recognised as a deep approach to
learning, where the intention is to understand through an active constructivist engagement
with knowledge, as opposed to a surface approach to learning, where the intention
is to reproduce through a passive incremental view of knowledge (see also Chapter 2).
It is important to note the keyword ‘intention’ here for, after the original and much-cited
work of Marton and Saljo (1976), the higher education sector grasped the metaphor of
deep and surface, and ironically began to characterise students as deep or surface.
Nothing could be further from the truth and there is an oft-quoted example in Ramsden
(1992), which clearly shows that students can readily adopt a surface or a deep approach
depending on how they perceive the learning context, and most crucially how they
perceive the assessment task.
Embedding assessment in curriculum design
Typically, when lecturers are given the opportunity to develop a module or course they
tend to start with the content. The teaching metaphor tends to revolve around ‘covering’
the subject area rather than facilitating students’ learning. Such a seemingly simple
difference hides a fundamental distinction between approaches to teaching being either,
in Prosser and Trigwell’s (1999) terminology, ‘conceptual change/student focused’ or
‘information-transmission/teacher-focused approach’. There is a growing body of
research which shows that students tend to adopt a deep approach to learning while their
lecturers adopt a more student-focused approach. In other words, when designing a
module we need to think about what we want the students to learn, rather than what we
teach. Taking this perspective is one of the main drives behind the current insistence in
the sector on determining learning outcomes, as they have the potential to foster a
preferred learning experience (such as higher-order cognitive skills and abilities as well
as a conceptual understanding of the subject matter) by shifting the focus from what we
teach to what our students learn. Learning outcomes, however, are contentious in that
they appear to lend a precision and a measurable specificity to the learning process that
cannot exist (Hussey and Smith, 2002). The unfortunate consequence is that learning
outcomes and constructive alignment, as put forward by Biggs (1996, 2003), have been
enthusiastically taken up by higher education management and by QAA. This has
resulted in the current trend to slavishly match assessment tasks with learning outcomes
in a formulaic way which tends to be operationalised in ‘rules’ from institutional quality
assurance offices. This is unfortunate because learning outcomes have become hidebound
by quality assurance practices, which do nothing to help the lecturer construct a meaningful
learning experience for her or his students, not at all what Biggs intended.