Assessment and feedback

Assessment is usually one of three kinds: of, for and as learning. Sometimes assessment can also be a combination of more than one of these types.

Assessment of learning

Assessment of learning, usually summative, means assessing students’ academic performances against learning outcomes and standards to grade or rank them. Sometimes this occurs late in a semester, sometimes on high-stakes assessments. Meaningful feedback for these types of assessments is often not practical, not provided, or not engaged with by students. (But it can be!)

Assessment for learning

Assessment for learning, both formative and summative, encourages educators to adapt their teaching approach and focus towards regular, ongoing or cumulative tasks (eg: live polls, discussions, project updates). Feedback can then be provided to students over the period of the assessment task, and students can use this assessment to improve their performance in subsequent submissions. Feedback can be provided not only for the current ongoing task, but can be used to ‘feed-forward’ to subsequent assessment tasks.

Assessment as learning

Assessment as learning typically involves students co-designing assessment tasks, rubrics and/or criteria themselves, based on subject learning outcomes and authentic and varied assessment strategies. Assessment as learning enhances students’ ability to evaluate their own work and engage in meta-cognition practices as well as to assess their conceptual understanding.

Self-assessment and self-evaluation

This article focuses on developing self-assessment capabilities in students and defines self-assessment within a framework of evaluative judgement provided by Tai et al. (2017) as the ‘capability to make decisions about the quality of work of self and others’.

Why are self-assessment and self-evaluation skills important for students?

Efficacy in self-assessment practices around the quality of works produced also fosters efficacy in peer-assessment capabilities and vice versa. Boud, Ajjawi, Dawson and Tai (2018) note that ‘evaluative judgement is a much more challenging capability to develop than the ability to guess one’s grades or compare oneself with others’.

A focus on self-evaluation and self-assessment capabilities as part of their learning of subject knowledge and ethical and collaborative capabilities means that students develop the independence and initiative to position assessment rubrics, outcomes, and criteria as less instructor-oriented marking tools and more student-oriented, self-evaluation learning tools as they alternatively develop, apply and reflect on these.
So, how can this development, applications and reflection be developed among students through self-assessment design?

Examples of self-evaluation and self-assessment tasks

  • LMS quizzes with feedback for different responses can be a simple and effective method of incorporating self-evaluation.
  • FeedbackFruits Peer Review assignments including self evaluation allows students to assess/review their own work using rubrics.
  • Devise learning activities where students apply assessment criteria and rubrics to their own and their peers’ drafts (or parts thereof) ahead of their submission of assessment tasks. For example, an LMS Discussion in which students assess their own draft methodology section of a lab report against the rubric and write a 40-word reflection on their insights. This could also work with an anonymised and approved example of a previous student’s work, where students assess the example against the rubric or their own work against the example and post to peers.
  • Develop a rubric that includes a criterion for students’ self-assessment of the quality of their work against the criteria/rubric and requiring exposition. What mark do they expect and why? An interesting take on the Dunning-Kruger effect – a key metric in self-assessment. As part of the assessment task, students would include a paragraph or section meaningfully assessing their performance on this task.
  • Run a gamified LMS-hosted formative task using a Discussion, Padlet or Poll Everywhere, whereby students contribute their top five reliable and valid MCQs for the week or module based on outcomes and these are up-voted or 'liked' by peers.
  • Design meaningful assessments that involve reflection and initiative. Some examples of this kind of self-assessment include ePortfolios, role-plays and scenarios, and teamwork reflections.
  • Ask students later in a semester to reflect on and evaluate an earlier contribution to a social annotation activity (eg FeedbackFruits collaborative reading) drawing on their subsequent learning around an issue, practice or procedure.
  • Talk to Learning Environments and the Melbourne Centre for the Study of Higher Education about incorporating their assessment literacy tool into your assessment strategy. The assessment literacy tool is an automated and LMS-integrated technology that allows students to assess an exemplar assessment or activity task against a rubric. and receive digital feedback on the accuracy off their judgement. Instructors get analytics on student performance. Assessment literacy development is part of the FlexAP foundational curriculum at Melbourne and subject coordinators can apply for funding to use it.

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