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

136 ❘
Teaching, supervising, learning
The key principle is to design assessment before designing the content of the module
as part of an integrated assessment system which serves the purposes of both assessing
for learning and the assessing of learning. The main aim of such a system is to ensure that
both students and lecturers are informed about how they (the students) are progressing,
which in turn enables more flexible and planned teaching (Ramsden, 2003; Birenbaum
et al., 2005).
Constructive alignment
Biggs (1996) argues that any learning takes place in a system in which if you change one
element of the system all the others must necessarily change in order to effect the desired
learning. In poorly integrated systems, it tends to be only the most able students who are
able to engage in learning at a deep level. In well-integrated systems, all students are
enabled to achieve the desired learning outcomes, although this is not to say that all
students will achieve them, as there is much individual variation. Constructive alignment
is an example of an integrated system, in which the constructive aspect refers to the
students constructing meaning through their learning activities and alignment refers to
the activities that the teacher does in order to support the desired learning outcomes. Put
very simply, the main principle is that there is a consistency between the three related
components of curriculum design:
1 what you want your students to learn (i.e. what learning outcomes will they achieve?);
2 what teaching methods you will use to enable them to achieve these learning
outcomes;
3 what assessment tasks and criteria you will use to show that students have achieved
the learning outcomes you intended (and how you will arrive at an overall grade/
mark).
Assessment methods
Helping students to achieve learning outcomes means setting assessment tasks that
support learning. Choosing an appropriate task is not easy, which is why the most
commonly used assessment tasks still tend to be the essay and/or the traditional timed
unseen examination, whatever its format, such as MCQs, short answers or mathematical
problems. The best advice is to make sure that the method chosen is relevant to the
learning outcome it is supposed to test. For example, if we want to test students’ ability
to construct a coherent and reasoned argument, then the essay would be appropriate,
but if we were more concerned with science students’ laboratory skills, an observed
performance assessment scheme might be more appropriate. Computer-based assessment
is increasingly being used to motivate students to learn, enable them to practise
disciplinary skills and abilities, broaden the range of knowledge assessed and increase