Assessment protocols
المؤلف:
Rob Cowdroy & Anthony Williams
المصدر:
Enhancing Teaching and Learning through Assessment
الجزء والصفحة:
P95-C9
2025-06-15
535
Assessment protocols
Assessment is widely considered as the mechanism by which student ability is measured, however assessment methods have recently been the subject of considerable review in response to external pressures, and educational assessment has additionally become the vehicle for accreditation (of programs), evaluation of "quality assurance" (of programs), "accountability" (of teaching effectiveness) and "transparency" (of teacher impartiality/probity), and even "accounting-ability" (cost-benefit of programs) (Williams & Cleary, 1999). While all of these purposes are primarily focused on graduate abilities as indicators, the respective value systems are related to differing agenda and criteria, and the multiplicity of purposes inevitably confuses and corrupts the educational assessment.
The following discussion is therefore confined to educational assessment.
Assessment of lower-level task abilities is most appropriately undertaken using conventional analogue assessment methods (using numerical systems as analogies for other value systems such as quality, ranking, etc), typically by right/wrong demonstration or multiple choice examination against elemental, binary (able/unable) criteria.
Assessing mid-level task abilities, however, is more appropriately undertaken using holistic/hermeneutic approaches (interpretation of work/evidence in terms of "accepted" quality/ranking value systems) that can simultaneously accommodate multiple and variable criteria associated with various types of knowledge, various thinking processes and application skills. In particular, mid-level task abilities involve facilitative thinking that includes making abstract connections between abstract theories, and therefore cannot be assessed by conventional analogue systems, but can be indicated by manifestations and circumstantial evidence that are "recognized" by informed assessors. For instance, students' case study projects addressing mid-level task abilities are increasingly assessed holistically by "informed" assessor panels in terms of what is accepted (e.g. by faculty or across a whole discipline) as "pass-quality", "credit-quality" and "distinction-quality".
Assessing higher-level task abilities (as defined above), particularly in an R&D teaching environment, requires a more radical approach such as Authenticative Assessment drawn from conventions of evaluation of research (Cowdroy & DeGraaff, 2005) and involving "expert" assessor panels who can recognize evidence of both the underlying facilitative thinking and the thinking behavior with attendant behavioral conditions that together constitute the outcome to be assessed. Authenticative assessment is of the student's rationale (presented and defended by the student) for interpretation of the assignment (e.g. problem) and for the particular response/solution proposed (among many possible interpretations and responses). Authenticative assessment closely reflects the assessment protocols in science (e.g. for individual research grants and refereed publication) and the evaluation of individual technical proposals in industry, commerce and the professions.
Authenticative and hermeneutic models of assessment are incompatible with elemental criteria and "economic" clerical or digital processing, but offer the opportunity to address a large body of student work (e.g. a major semester-long project), covering all subjects, in one sitting of the assessor panel, so that they are significantly more economical than conventional assessment by individual teachers for each subject.
Our research and development shows that consistent use of Authenticative and hermeneutic assessment strategies based on context-related and orthodox practice criteria, allows students to develop self-evaluation and self-direction capabilities closely related to practice, and offers opportunities for development of student-centred forms of contract assessment. Further, our research shows that development of collegiate student environments allows development of combinations of self-assessment and peer-group evaluation, and offers "cascade" benefits to weaker students in a given cohort and to successive cohorts, with flow-on benefits of significantly accelerated development of "relevant" task abilities, greatly improved student satisfaction, and significant reduction in repetitive teaching.
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