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Scope

(N.B. that in the UK, and here on these pages, "assessment" usually means testing students' learning attainments, while "evaluation" usually refers to measuring and otherwise judging how well a course has been designed and run by staff. In the US, "assessment" usually refers to this latter.)

This set of pages is about principles for good "assessment" (primarily in HE), where "good" mainly means good for students' learning. However we define the scope of the area very broadly to include

1. not only summative assessment for certificates, but also
2. formative feedback to students on their completed work, and furthermore
3. individual advice for students during a task they are engaged on (e.g. in labs, or for projects).

Taken together this still does not include every major part of course design: it does not include curriculum design, nor primary expositions (such as textbooks or lectures), nor in the main conventional seminars and tutorials.

There are several lines of argument independently linking these three things within the scope of a single topic.

• Even if your only interest is in summative measures of completed learning, you shouldn't use any test or measure without giving the students practice at it. If you do, you will be measuring to a significant degree either their ability to guess right what is wanted in a new format, or the amount of practice of this format they had had in previous institutions or courses: and not measuring the amount of knowledge they have of the content. If you give them practice of this format (including feedback), then you have to design and deliver formative feedback and summative testing as one combined issue, thus linking (1) and (2).

• If you are aiming to maximise learning (usually taken as the job of teachers) then you will probably accept the aim of "assessment for learning". As Black & Wiliam and others have established, the most effective single intervention to improve learning is to deliver formative feedback. This is associated with the way learning is strongly connected with doing: with performing tasks that exercise the new knowledge, preferably by requiring its use in some other format than the one in which it was originally presented. In many HE courses, students discover what they don't know (only) as they try to carry out the task, and then seek answers to their questions. Effective access to such answers is often a crucial determinant of students' performance, as is recognised by the traditional ways of supplying this service by tutorial supervision or "lab. demonstrators". This links (2) and (3).

• There is an important argument that an aim of HE should be to equip students for lifelong learning: that is, to learn independently in future, rather than being dependent on frequent contact with teachers. A major aspect of equipping them in this way is to introduce them to self-assessment and peer assessment as useful sources of assistance (that do not require teachers). Thus peer and self assessment and feedback are educational objectives in themselves, and should be promoted directly for their own sakes as well as for efficiencies and effectiveness. They arise most naturally in (3) and (2); but this leads to the question of whether we should consider them also for (1).

• Additionally, there are arguments due to Taras that the human cognitive processes of making formative and summative judgements (comments and assigning marks) are closely linked: if you do one, you will have done most of the work for doing the other. For instance, in assessing an essay (or a computer program) most of the work is in reading and understanding it, and producing a mark as well as comments, or comments as well as a mark is a relatively small additional bit of work. Consequently it is profoundly wasteful to divide these functions in designing course provision: they should be designed together. This links (1) and (2).

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