LEARNING-ORIENTED ASSESSMENT PROJECT (LOAP) 3 year Teaching Development Grant Project Sept 2002 - July 2005 David Carl

1. LEARNING-ORIENTED ASSESSMENT PROJECT (LOAP) 3 year Teaching Development Grant Project Sept 2002 - July 2005David CarlessHong Kong Institute of Education

2. Terminology • Learning-oriented assessment Assessment processes which explicitly focus on enhancing student learning (rather than measuring student learning) Cf. formative assessment / assessment for learning / classroom assessment / developmental assessment / constructivist teaching and learning / feedback for learning

3. Ineffective feedback • Too late • Impact of mark on ego/self • Mainly one-way and in writing • Task specific, often doesn’t help students for the next task • Little leverage on students to act • Time-consuming and inefficient for staff

4. More effective feedback • Timely e.g. feedback on summative assessment before submission • Involving dialogue • Focuses on criteria rather than self, perhaps without mark • Involving peer and self-assessment • Facilitating recipe for future action • Promoting learner independence / lifelong learning

5. HKIEd students’ views on feedback Feedback should be: • timed to suit the students • be specific to student needs and difficulties • be prompt, supportive and oral • involve a dialogue which includes helping the lecturer to understand the students’ thought processes (Carless, 2002, 2003a)

6. LOAP aims • To identify, promote and disseminate good practices in learning-oriented assessment in higher education in Hong Kong • To develop a discourse concerning the role of assessment as a source of student learning • To enhance lecturer capacities in assessment processes for supporting student learning

7. Intended outcomes of LOAP • Dialogue, sharing, experimentation and enhanced teaching, learning and assessment • Ready to use tools • Summaries of useful practices • Reports from questionnaire surveys of student / staff perspectives on assessment • Action research working papers • Academic publications e.g. edited collections of papers

8. Perspectives on formative assessment • Significant learning gains derived from well-focused formative assessment (Black & Wiliam, 1998) • But formative assessment has different interpretations or is often weakly understood (e.g. Black & Wiliam, 1998; Sadler, 1989) • Useful to distinguish a) formal / planned and b) informal / incidental formative assessment (Bell & Cowie, 2001; Knight & Yorke, 2003)

9. Challenges for formative assessment • Challenging the dominance of summative forms of assessment (cf. Knight, 2002) • Tensions between formative and summative functions of assessment - very few teachers can operate parallel systems of formative and summative functions of assessment (Wiliam, 2000)

10. Challenges for assessment change • Assessment is often the most intransigent part of the higher education system (McGill & Beaty, 2001) • Academic staff often have subject rather than assessment expertise • Challenge of reaching out to those who have little assessment interest / expertise

11. Possible ways forward • Selling the formative to the students e.g. integrating the formative with the summative (Carless, 2002) • Timely feedback to students received while it still matters to them (Gibbs & Simpson, 2003) • Formative assessment which supports the development of skills for high-stakes testing (e.g. McDonald & Boud, 2003)

12. Possible areas for discussion • What are effective and efficient ways of providing feedback to students? • How might we best stimulate colleagues to embrace assessment change or to improve their (formative) assessment strategies?

13. Research evidence - Butler(1988) • Group A – mark only • Group B – comments only • Group C – mark + comments In a controlled experiment, which group made the biggest learning gains and why?