Chapter 4: Assessment in Higher Education 4.1 Introduction
4.2 Participative assessment and its contribution to student learning .1 Introduction
4.2.4 Inducting students into assessment communities
Throughout this chapter I have argued for a constructivist understanding of learning and teaching in which teachers and students engage jointly in the construction of knowledge.
Central to this paradigm is the goal of creating learning communities defined by involving
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students in collaborative approaches to learning and teaching (see Boud, Cohen and Sampson, 1999: 415). Within this paradigm teachers may be subject experts, but their primary responsibility is to facilitate pedagogical processes intended to empower students by promoting critical engagement with content, deep approaches to learning and metacognitive development. Similarly, given the arguments already presented in favour of an assessment- for-learning approach to assessment, a social constructivist orientation should also aim to induct students into an assessment community with the aim of empowering students by involving them directly in assessment opportunities that develop both their learning and their metacognition (Elwood and Klenowski, 2002: 246).
The motivation for establishing such communities are manifold, ranging from largely pragmatic and practical strategies intended to enhance student learning, to critical considerations relating to the power and domination within the learning milieu. On one hand, the formation of assessment communities – including both students and teachers – may help students to determine and pursue particular standards of performance. On the other hand, the formation of assessment communities involves teachers sharing control with students and this can break, or at least weaken, the stranglehold exerted by academic elites and encourage collaborations in different spheres within the teaching and learning context. That these two motivations are not exclusive will become evident at the end of this sub-section.
There are, as I have already argued, compelling arguments for involving students in the development and use of clearly defined assessment criteria despite the intricacies of students and teachers agreeing on how such criteria should be applied (see Rust, Price and O’Donovan, 2003). However, as Shay (2005: 664) has argued in a study of assessment communities comprising academic staff, when assessment is viewed from an interpretive point of view (consistent with the curriculum-as-practice or curriculum-as-praxis)
“differences between markers are not ‘error’, but rather the inescapable outcome of the multiplicity of perspectives that assessors bring with them” (ibid.). The influence of such differences has important implications for participative assessment processes because if, as Shay’s (ibid.) research demonstrates, academics struggle to reach consensus between themselves, how can relative novices to both the subject matter and the assessment contexts be expected to arrive at shared understandings that can usefully aid learning?
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Rust et al. (2003: 160) suggest that part of the answer rests on the recognition that knowledge transference cannot be restricted solely to an explicit articulation of goals and standards contained within assessment criteria. They suggest that some of the factors that influence judgements are not reducible to explicit standards and that both teachers and students also draw on tacit knowledge in making judgements. Such tacit knowledge is not based merely on personal taste or opinion, but rather is founded on collegial interaction and experience of engaging with multiple examples of similar cases (see Shay, 2007: 9). The transfer of such knowledge, O’Donovan et al. (2004: 331) suggest, takes place through “social processes involving the sharing of experiences through methods such as practice, imitation and observation” and “dialogue” (Rust et al., 2007: 151). These processes are precisely the ones teachers should be encouraging if they want students to become effective members of assessment communities, able to not only make sense of explicit criteria, but also to gain deep insights into the often tacit expectations of disciplines and professions. This experience cannot be gained through conventional assessment practices: instead, students must be provided with authentic opportunities to experience how the assessment process works from the point of view of the assessor and through this experience gain insights into the processes.
In short, by involving students in assessment communities, teachers provide opportunities for them to learn how to assess the work of others and through these experiences encourage them to become more critical of their own work (Grant, 2005: 42).
A second dimension involved in developing assessment communities relates to the potential such processes have to empower students to make decisions about their own learning, to take direct action based on these decisions, to critique the assessment regime and to negotiate practices that are different from those proposed by teachers (Leach et al., 2001: 294). For Leach et al. (2001:297) the need for student empowerment rests on the recognition that knowledge cannot simply be replicated, but rather that it emerges through “rational debate between different viewpoints that examine all assumptions and their consequences” (ibid.).
Such debate must include both the views of students and those of teachers. Traditional assessment approaches demand a simple, unchallenged replication of professional or disciplinary-based knowledge within a dominant discourse of teacher-expert power. Such approaches effectively silence students and prevent them from positioning themselves in relation to the ideas and practices that they encounter (ibid.: 298). In contrast, participative assessment deliberately involves students in determining, understanding and applying explicit criteria and in the collaborative construction of understandings of how tacit knowledge can be
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accessed and understood. Such approaches seek to empower students to challenge dominant ideas and to construct themselves as autonomous learners with the ultimate goal of preparing them to act as autonomous professionals.
For Reynolds and Trehan (2000: 272) the involvement of students in assessment communities must go beyond dialogue: it must also result in visible changes in classroom relations. Such changes must include students in the area where power is most directly exerted in classrooms – the grading of summative assessment tasks (Taras, 2001: 612). Reynolds and Trehan (2000:
272) also suggest that “if students know that [teachers] will intervene if they think the marking is unsatisfactory, the procedure cannot be claimed to be either participative or empowering” (ibid.). This view is supported by Taras (2001: 612), who argues that “if students do not have access to the summative assessment process, then any involvement in the powerbase of higher education can only be peripheral”. While I share these sentiments, I believe it is important to recognise the importance of assessment communities within such processes.
Learners and teachers may reach different conclusions in assessing tasks, but within the parameters of a learning community such disagreements should be welcomed as opportunities for further dialogue and learning. Students must be confident that their assessments will have a direct influence on final results or grades, but teachers should not be excluded from these processes. Precisely how assessment decisions are taken and who takes them is one of the many issues assessment communities must negotiate. The process encourages the challenging of assessment decisions and consequently requires assessors – students and teachers – to clearly articulate why and how decisions have been reached. By involving students in assessment communities, participative assessment not only empowers students, but can also support teachers’ efforts to promote deep approaches to learning by requiring students to articulate how and whether they have demonstrated the capacity to meet course outcomes.