Using Online Environments to Promote Assessment as a Learning Enhancement Process
المؤلف:
Mary Rice & Coral Campbell & Judith Mousley
المصدر:
Enhancing Teaching and Learning through Assessment
الجزء والصفحة:
P418-C35
2025-08-13
355
Using Online Environments to Promote Assessment as a Learning Enhancement Process
Over the past few years, there has been increased attention paid to assessment in higher education institutions, due largely to changes in government expectations and in the diversity of the student cohorts.
Imperatives for systemic change in assessment practices have been articulated by a number of scholars including Gibbs (1992), Brown and Knight (1994), Morgan and O'Reilly (1999), Entwistle (2002), James, McKinnis and Devlin (2002) and Biggs (2003). Such authors have argued that university assessment has been too narrow and therefore has not adequately reflected the quality, breadth and depth of students' learning. In respect to this, Nightingale et al. (1996) emphasized the need to assess a broader 'cluster of abilities' that included critical thinking, judgement making, problem solving, development of plans, demonstration of techniques and procedures, finding and managing information, creative design and performance, and communication skills (p. 3).
A key problem that these authors identify in common is that while assessment requirements are central to the learning experience for students, what is not assessed is often not learnt well because students generally prioritize what they need to know for formal, graded assessments. They tend to disregard academic content seen as less relevant to those requirements, so much potential educational value of coursework is lost. Clearly, the predominance of essays and examinations in University assessment has potentially constrained learning, particularly when used for summative purposes only.
A second problem commonly identified is a lack of focus on the deeper understanding of underpinning principles and ideas and students' abilities and dispositions to employ these purposefully, critically and rationally across a range of situations. Norris and Ennis (Norris & Ennis, 1990), for instance, stressed the need for assessment tasks to involve a variety of types of critical thinking as well as opportunities to display commitment to their use in relevant contexts.
A third common element is the need for teaching and assessment to be seen as interactive throughout the pedagogical experience. Ramsden (2003), for example, made the point that "Assessment's educational value depends on our understanding of its multiple purposes and how these are related ... and on how successfully we integrate the process of making judgements into the job of teaching. ... Much assessment still proceeds from an ingenuous conception focused on methods of collecting information and comparing the relative worth of different students" (p.205).
We attempt to shed some light on what happened when academic staff reconsidered their assessment practices and implemented more innovative approaches in online contexts. These approaches aimed at encouraging deeper understandings by bringing assessment and teaching processes into the same realm of quality learning, by using assessment to inform plans for on-going teaching, and by assessing learning communities, contexts and products at the same time as assessing individual student performance. As well as identifying issues that arose in each case, the paper highlights key factors that appear to be necessary for change in assessment to occur.
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