Reflections on AHEC 2: Assessment transparency

mangleI should start by saying that Tim Hunt’s summary of last week’s Assessment in Higher Education Conference is excellent, so I don’t know why I’m bothering! Seriously, we went to some different sessions, in particular Tim went to many more sessions on feedback than I did, so do take a look at his blog posting.

Moving on to “Assessment transparency”. I’m picking up here on one of the themes that Tim also alludes to, the extend to which our students do, or don’t, understand what is required of them in assessed tasks. The fact that students don’t understand what we expect them to do is one of the findings I reported on in my presentation “Formative thresholded evaluation : Reflections on the evaluation of a faculty-wide change in assessment practice” which is on Slideshare here. Similar issues were raised in the presentation I attended immediately beforehand (by Anke Buttner and entitled “Charting the assessment landscape: Preliminary evaluations of an assessment map”). This is not complicated stuff we’re talking about – not anything as sophisticated as having a shared understanding of the purpose of assessment (though that would be nice!).

It might seem obvious that  we want students to know what they have to do in assessment tasks, but there is actually a paradox in all of this. To quote Tim Hunt’s description of a point in Jo-Anne Baird’s final keynote: “if assessment is too transparent it encourages pathological teaching to the test. This is probably where most school assessment is right now, and it is exacerbated by the excessive ways school exams are made hight stakes, for the student, the teacher and the school. Too much transparency (and risk averseness) in setting assessment can lead to exams that are too predicable, hence students can get a good mark by studying just those things that are likely to be on the exam. This damages validity, and more importantly damages education.”. Suddenly things don’t seem quite so straightforward.

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