Assessment is for learning seminar, Birmingham, June 15

Having attended the seminar on Assessment for learning yesterday at Birmingham, I am left with a number of general thoughts and some specific ones:
Firstly, isn't Birmingham run down? away from the shiny new replacement Bullring the train out to Longbridge brought back memories of visiting Kath in Bournville. despite trying hard to see the picturesque and to concentrate on the narrow boats chugging down the canel, what i really saw was the deprivation. despite witnessing the jolly good humour of the uniformed public school children coming home, what really struck me was the small group of brummie kids sitting opposite me who were never going to have any real chances...
At the workshop itself I was struck by two further things: the confidence of those operating within research-intensive red brick university's to state things with utter confidence that were either blindingly obvious or far more complex than they were suggesting. Alongside that was the seemingly unassailable status of "scientific" (in this case social science) research. it appeared as though things only existed if they had been proven by research, never mind common sense telling us the same thing a long time ago. This seems to me to be about the power of numbers (graphs in this case) to "prove" things. This seems to me to be about controlling the environment and I am moving rapidly to the view that things cannot be controlled, that it is all a bit chaotic. That doesn't mean that such a thought is not unsettling but I think I am will have to live with that.
The second general thought at the workshop was about the desperation of the HEA to show that it is involved, even leading things. their representative said nothing of significance but was determined to illustrate how they were moving the sector forward. the same was true of the (poor) presentation from the C-SAP representative. these words struck me as the waves of a drowning man just before his head goes down for the last time. Just when i think I should put the effort in to joining the organisation, one of their representatives shows up to illustrate why I don't need to bother!

At the workshop itself the following struck me:
1. There is an inescapable need in HE to chase NSS results. why is this? the survey seems flawed and many have said so, but it does provide numbers and their associated graphs and does produce league tables. however this seems to me to be bad science. The results of asking a student to rank a statement 1-5 are arbitrary, they do not provide a "real" view" and scaled up they do not provide a "real" view of the student body. despite all this all HEIs are guilty of capitulating to this new orthodoxy, despite any hollow defence they may make as they go. it was true in Birmingham and it is true at DMU.
2. the workshop suggested that staff are interested in using assessment to produce critical thinkers and that when students say they want more feedback they are buying in to that concept. this may be true, but it might also be nonsense! Students may be working far more strategically, in that they want feedback that helps them to improve their marks and thus pass with a better final degree and perhaps get a better job (which earns more money, which allows them to get a bigger TV and a faster car etc, etc). They are thus not buying into the idea of becoming more critical thinkers at all.
3. as has been said by many people in many places, we need to understand the experience pre HE if we are to make sense of students' views and expectations. A'level feedback seems to me to be about how a student can gain additional marks, which might be about making something better but might not. gaining more marks is instrumental, it is based on a criterion-referenced approach which works on the basis that all students can achieve the top grades. it is not normative. This may be more democratic, more egalitarian but it is also different in nature to the idea of assessment being about producing critical thinkers. this needs to be understood.
4. there is a need to understand that just as all students are different so are all staff and to imagine that there is a similar view of what is good work and thus helpful feedback across all subject disciplines is to be naive in the extreme. my research suggests that staff are clearly divided by their discipline and that this needs to be remembered at all times. alongside this is the fact that different disciplines use different forms of assessment and the attendant feedback. it is hard, for example, to compare an essay in Humanities with a project in art and design. the teaching environment and the subject cultures are different and so, therefore, will be the nature of feedback.
5. finally alongside this previous point is the attitude taken towards marking as an exercise. are staff starting from a view that their job is to help the student to develop or do they think they are there to safeguard standards? Is their role to stop the hoards entering the secret garden to to show people where the door is and how to gain entry? these are obviously not the only views but they6 do represent significant bodies of opinion. they are important because they affect the way marks allocate marks. on the one hand they may be starting from 0% and looking for ways of giving marks to students, on the other they may be starting from 100% and looking for excuses to take marks away from students.
these views, not surprisingly lead to the development of inconsistencies in the marks given and the feedback provided to students. but what should be done about this? if we try to have a shared approach there is the accusation of new managerialism and a reduction in professional autonomy; if we let the local context predominate then we will have students complaining in the NSS about a lack of consistency and poor management. there is no simple solution but if staff were aware of these notions then they may be able to start on the path towards a better solution with their eyes open. that would be a start.

resilient education?

just been to a seminar about education - HE in particular - and a resilient education. what struck me the most is that the key problem is with Capitalism, especially the idea of increased consumption fueled by competition, fueled by marketing. If we could change the world so that individuals didn't value themselves according to how much they had then perhaps we would be better off. I watched a TV programme last night about WAGs working in S. Africa and Emile Heskey's wife said that he earned £160,000 a week and that a donation of just one of this weekly amount could solve many of the problems in at least part of this continent. As a society we need to move to a position where we consider it to be morally wrong that the massive differences in salaries can be seen as acceptable. why does society value footballers and other entertainers so highly? is there something intrinsically valuable in what they do? we would probably say not. so how can the market be allowed to create such discrepancies? to govern/regulate this IS to threaten capitalism but is that such a bad thing if the result is to the betterment of the majority?