2 Assessing students' work First Words

2.7
Preparing students for assessment

Introduction -- the rules of assessment

Assessment in higher education can usefully be considered as, among many other more serious and important things, a game. What might some of the rules be? Here are some suggestions.

The lecturers:

The students: Given this, what rules should govern your behaviour in helping students to prepare for assessment? We would suggest:
This section concentrates on rules 6 and 7, informed by the previous five.

What will this first word try to do?

It will help you to prepare your students for assessment in a way which is sensitive to their needs and to the norms of the course, the school and Brookes. It will try to persuade you that helping the students to understand the learning outcomes and the assessment criteria does not contravene rule 3!

Clarifying the formal assessment requirements

Regulations

If you haven't already received them, get hold of the relevant assessment regulations; university and course and module. Work through them, and see what they mean, for the students and for you.

Requirements

As well as regulations there will be assessment requirements. For example, for projects there will be hand-in dates, required formats, obligatory cover sheets. Students will expect you to know what these requirements are.Discover what they are, be familiar with them, work through them to see what implications they have for students, and for you.

Answering student questions

A student asks you: 'If I fail one of my modules this year but get at least a B in the rest can I still do my current selection of modules in the third year?'
Do you work through the regulations with the student to find the answer; investigate and answer such questions yourself; or refer the questions or indeed the student to the module, year or course leader?
Talk to the module leader about what he or she would prefer you to do. In general, be cautious in answering the more complex questions about assessment regulations and requirements. Anything you say on the subject may be taken down by the student and used, not necessarily entirely accurately, later.
A student asks you 'What's the hand-in date for this piece of work?' You should know the answer, or be able to find it within seconds.

Clarifying learning outcomes

Getting a clear view of what a learning outcome means takes time. Don't plan to spend one whole session with your students working on outcomes and criteria, and assume that will do it. Spread the work out through the course. Here are some approaches:

At an early meeting of the class

Draw the students attention to the section of the course or module guide, handbook or syllabus where the learning outcomes are listed. Tell them that these are the things they will need to be able to do to pass the course or module. Tell them, briefly, what you think they mean. Ask them if they have any questions. They probably will, generally along the lines of, 'What exactly does that mean?' Because learning outcomes can seem a bit abstract or unclear, give the students some examples of what they mean. For example, show them a question from last year's examination and explain how you think it tests a particular learning outcome. Encourage discussion. Reassure the students that you’ll keep on coming back to the learning outcomes during the course.

During the course

Routinely start sessions by saying something like, 'Today the class relates mainly to these learning outcomes' and then refer to them in the course or module handbook. When you are setting student work, talk through how the work relates to one or more of the course outcomes: 'You'll see that, once you can answer questions like this correctly, you've achieved most of outcome 4.'
Encourage and support continued discussion on what the current learning outcome means and how it relates to the session. This is excellent preparation for assessment.

Clarifying assessment criteria

Once the students start producing work, in the class or between classes, you can start similar work on the assessment criteria. This can lead to fascinating and important discussions.
For example, an overall assessment might say, in part: 'To obtain maximum marks the essay must be within + or - 10% of the specified length, and must provide a comprehensive overview of the main debates around the topic, leading to a definite and well-reasoned conclusion.'
Apart from encouraging them to find out how the word-counter works on their word processor, you could hold lively and productive discussions on the meaning, within the course, of each of the underlined words or phrases in the sentence.

Helping students to make assessment judgements

When we assess, we can learn almost as much about the assessment process and the judgements we make as we learn about the students and what they have learned. You can use this fact to help your students prepare for being assessed by doing some assessing for themselves. Here's a possible sequence of activities.

Good news, bad news

Give the students each a short piece of student work (real, maybe from one of last year’s students, or simulated) on the topic. Ask them what they think is good about it and what they think is bad, and how it could be improved. Get them to work on this alone, then in pairs, then in bigger groups, finally pooling their conclusions for you to write up publicly. This is usually a lively and very productive exercise. It's a fine and relevant ice-breaker to use in the first two or three weeks, of a course.

Devising a marking scheme

Tell the students what marking schemes are. Show them one or two. Give them an example of the kind of question they could be asked to do on the course; even better, tell them about a piece of work they’re actually going to be doing in the near future. Then, informed by the 'good news, bad news' exercise and using the same sort of group method, get them to devise marking schemes. Discuss them. Try to agree one with the class as whole. They'll probably be able to settle on some common elements, but not on everything; they'll be unlikely to agree on the weightings of marks which should be given to each element.

Using a marking scheme

Get hold of some answers to the question you worked on in the previous activity. Ask the students to mark them, using the marking schemes they devisedÐtheir own, or the class composite one. They should do this in pairs or threes.

Write up the marks which each small group awards. Then get them to explore; perhaps after remixing the student groups; the reasons for any discrepancies in their marks. Work with them to revise the marking scheme to produce fewer discrepancies in marking. Explore with them the issues which underlie any remaining disagreements, about the 'right' marking scheme or about assessments made using the marking scheme.

A good alternative is to ask them each to produce at least an outline answer to the question. They could then mark their own answers; then and when you judge that the degree of trust in the class is high enough, each other's. You can collect a few sample answers and their associated marks, and again explore the adequacy of the marking schemes and the issues and problems involved in their use.

Devising assessment criteria

After all this, you can usefully encourage the students to go beyond marking schemes, which are specific to one question, and devise more general assessment criteria for work in the module. The sorts of processes suggested above will work.

Using assessment criteria

Much the same exercise suggested above for using marking schemes can be used with assessment criteria. Again students need to use the criteria to see what they mean in practice, and to see what problems the use of criteria solves and does not solve.

Learning the technical skills of being assessed

Every year, students do less well than they could in assessments, especially in examinations, for reasons that have little or nothing to do with their knowledge of or ability in the subject. They answer the wrong number of questions on the paper. They don’t notice that some questions carry more marks than others. They "describe" when they should have "analysed" or "compared and contrasted". As well as giving thorough briefing, you can help your students avoid such traps by offering one or two sessions in which they practise being examined. In a hour they can at least plan how they’d answer a three-hour examination, or they could answer one question. Afterwards, review with the students how they did.

Final Comments

Should you really be giving all this emphasis to assessment? I think so -- for at least two reasons.

First and most obviously, students care a lot about assessment. It seems appropriate to help them to do as well as they can, paying due regard to the rules suggested at the start of this first word.

My second reason is that, in discussing what makes a piece of work in the subject good or less good, we are surely dealing with the very heart of the subjectÐwith the meaning of standards and quality in that subject. Assessment is, in the best possible sense of the term, an academic business, and a very proper topic for discussion between tutor and students.

Doesn't all this take time?

Yes. And it pays off. Investing time in clarifying assessment during a course gives students a much better view of what they are trying to achieve. This increases their ability to become effective independent learners. You're reallocating time from trying to teach them everything to helping them develop skills of goal-directed learning.

Last modified: Friday, 06-Jan-12 17:39:24 GMT