What Do We Mean by Assessment?

Assessment is one of the most significant areas of an educational system. It defines what students take to be important, how they spend much of their academic time and in may ways how they value themselves. Rowntree (1987: 1) says of assessment 'if we wish to discover the truth about an educational system, we must look to its assessment procedures.' In addition, assessment is important because students cannot avoid it, as Boud (1995: 35) says:

'Students can, with difficulty, escape from the effects of poor teaching, they cannot (by definition if they want to graduate) escape the effects of poor assessment'.

This underlines the importance of getting our assessment practices right for our students.

Rowntree (1987: 1) states that assessment procedures offer answers to the following questions:-

'What student qualities and achievements are actively valued and rewarded by the system? How are its purposes and intentions realised? To what extent are the hopes and ideals, aims and objectives professed by the system ever truly perceived, valued and striven for by those who make their way within it?'

Allied to this is the fact that assessment has two main purposes within further and higher education:

The first reason is to assist learning. When looking at this area we must always strive to make the assessment relevant to the overall goals of the unit and to make our assessment part of the learning process.
The second is to determine the effectiveness of the education system. Only with this can we as educators improve the education of our students. However we must be able to determine not only the overall learning but which areas are not effective and need modification.

As tutors we assess for a variety of reasons:

To pass or fail a student.
To grade or rank a student.
To select for future courses.
To predict success in future courses.
To provide a profile of what a student has learnt.
To diagnose students' strengths and weaknesses.
To provide feedback to students to improve their learning.
To help students to develop their skills of self-assessment.
To motivate students to provide feedback to teachers.
To evaluate a course's strengths and weaknesses.

We must then question what we are assessing in the first place. A number of assessment points must be considered among which are:

What do we want to assess?
For what purpose?
In which mode?

We need to be specific; for our students we need to ask the questions why, what and how, and relate these to the objectives of our courses and the learning outcomes we devise for our students.

We must ask these questions to make sure that our assessment matches our educational purposes. As a tutor we then should find the most appropriate assessment method for the set assignment or to assess the desired learning. When considering the assessment tasks we set we need to consider the strengths and weaknesses.

We should also appreciate that students expect to receive much of their information, whether educational or social, from online resources and so we should be moving to assessing them by congruent means. As student numbers have increased, and staff contact hours have in many cases decreased, students have asked for supplementary support. An example of this is given by Clarke 'Students had requested additional ways in which to learn and judge their progress during periods of low contact time with their tutors - especially in the lead up to examination' (Clarke et al., 2004:250).

'From the INQUIRE evaluation it is strongly indicated that reinforcing the content of the lectures through formative assessment can act to cement students' understanding of key concepts and ideas' (Clarke et al., 2004: 259).