Assessment for learning

In classrooms where assessment for learning is practised, students are encouraged to be more active in their learning and associated assessment. The ultimate purpose of assessment for learning is to create self-regulated learners who can leave school able and confident to continue learning throughout their lives. Teachers need to know at the outset of a unit of study where their students are in terms of their learning and then continually check on how they are progressing through strengthening the feedback they get from their learners. Students are guided on what they are expected to learn and what quality work looks like. The teacher will work with the student to understand and identify any gaps or misconceptions (initial/diagnostic assessment). As the unit progresses, the teacher and student work together to assess the student's knowledge, what she or he needs to learn to improve and extend this knowledge, and how the student can best get to that point (formative assessment). Assessment for learning occurs at all stages of the learning process.

Researchers whose work has informed much of this assessment reform include Ken O'Connor, Grant Wiggins, Jay McTighe, Richard Stiggins, Paul Black, Dylan Wiliam, Chris Harrison, Bethan Marshall, Gordon Stobart, Caroline Gipps, Joanna Goodman, Thomas Guskey, Damian Cooper, Philippe Perrenoud, Royce Sadler, Bronwen Cowie, Margaret Heritage and Ronán Howe.

In past decades, teachers would design a unit of study that would typically include objectives, teaching strategies, and resources. The student's mark on this test or exam was taken as the indicator of his or her understanding of the topic. In 1998, Black & Wiliam produced a review that highlighted that students who learn in a formative way achieve significantly better than matched control groups receiving normal teaching. Their seminal work developed into several important research projects on Assessment for Learning by the King's College team including Kings-Medway-Oxfordshire Formative Assessment Project (KMOFAP), Assessment is For learning (Scotland), Jersey-Actioning-Formative Assessment (Channel Islands), and smaller projects in England, Wales, Peru, and the USA.

A complex assessment is the one that requires a rubric and an expert examiner. Example items for complex assessment include thesis, funding proposal, etc. The complexity of assessment is due to the format implicitness. In the past it has been puzzling to deal with the ambiguous assessment criteria for final year project (FYP) thesis assessment. Webster, Pepper and Jenkins (2000) discussed some common general criteria for FYP thesis and their ambiguity regarding use, meaning and application. Woolf (2004) more specifically stated on the FYP assessment criterion weighting:‘The departments are as silent on the weightings that they apply to their criteria as they are on the number of criteria that contribute to a grade’. A more serious concern was raised by Shay (2004) who argued that the FYP assessment for engineering and social sciences is ‘a socially situated interpretive act’, implying that many different alternative interpretations and grades are possible for one assessment task. The problems with the FYP thesis assessment have thus received much attention over the decades since the assessment difficulty was discussed by Black (1975).

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