Learning-oriented assessment

1. Learning-oriented
assessment
David Carless
Presentation at Hang Seng
Management College,
Jan 22, 2015
The University of Hong Kong

2. Overview
 Challenges in assessment
 Learning-oriented assessment
 Three key components
 Implications for practice
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3. Aims of presentation
• To explore how assessment might
become more of a learning tool than a
grading tool
• Drawing on ideas in my forthcoming book
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5. Competing priorities
Assessment needs to:
1.Judge student achievement
2.Support student learning
3.Satisfy demands of accountability
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6. Learning-oriented assessment
A major priority in all assessment should be
to promote effective student learning
processes (Carless, 2014, 2015)
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7. The University of Hong Kong
Productive assessment
task design
Student self-evaluative
capacities
Student engagement
with feedback
Learning-oriented assessment framework

8. Task design principles
• Integrated with instruction and ILOs
• Spreading student effort
• Mirroring real-life uses of the discipline
• Integrated and coherent
• Incorporates feedback dialogues
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9. Self-evaluative capacities
• The most important thing a teacher can do
is to help students learn for themselves
• “the most effective teaching eventually
makes the teacher unnecessary” (Riordan
& Loacker, 2008)
• Student self-evaluation needs teaching,
modeling, nurturing
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10. Two proverbs
• Give a man a fish you feed him for a day
• Teach a man to fish you feed him for a
lifetime
• Give a man a fish you feed him for a day
• Give him an iPhone and he won’t bother
you for weeks
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11. Engagement with feedback
• Feedback needs to connect with students
needs and interests
• Timeliness is important
• Promoting student uptake of feedback
• To appreciate feedback, students need
effective self-evaluative capacities
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13. But feedback challenges ..
• Emotional and social-affective issues
• Honest critical feedback
• Often comes too late
• Fails to engage students
• Limitations of teacher monologue
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14. Implications
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15. Task design
• Two or three smallish integrated tasks
Oral presentation 30% + Written report 70%
OR
Group project 30% + Individual work 50% +
Participation 20%
• Cumulative and integrated
• Programme-based approaches
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16. Self-evaluation activities
• Involve students in generating, applying or
working with rubrics
• Provide exemplars/samples of student
work for analysis
• Promote different forms of peer dialogue
and collaboration
• Encourage student responsibility in self-
evaluating their own work in progress
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17. Feedback activities
• Encouraging dialogues of different forms
- A bit more in-class guidance and feedback,
bit less at end
- Some peer feedback, peer review
- Promote online discussion
• Integrated assignments which promote
student use of feedback
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18. THANK YOU
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