Assessment conference, UCLan 8th July 2010

Travelling by train to Preston is not the best way to appreciate its splendour; the route takes you passed dilapidated housing and scrub land - a bit like Leicester in that respect!
The town centre is a confusing mixture: a magnificent civic square sits on a hill with a fine church and war memorial and an imposing city library built at the height of Victorian confidence. its ionic columns and edifying phrases cut into the stone remind its citizens that mental efforts pay dividends. However in the shadow of the square the shops do not live up to this splendour, with names such as "Duffer" and "Faidz" (sic) indicating (I hope) an unconscious irony.
UCLan seems to be the saviour of at least a part of the city. It has colonised the old buildings along a main road and has built anew, creating a campus which seems something like a stretched version of DMU: urban and utilitarian, green and leafy and serving its city's needs well.

The conference itself was very well attended, attracting a delegate list from across the region and more broadly, including some delegates from overseas.
David Boud, Professor of Adult Education at the University of Sidney gave the first keynote address: "The New Assessment Agenda". His argument was that assessment as it is currently conceptualised does not give students the skills to "learn and regenerate" which they will need if they are to adapt and evolve in response to the new situations that are emerging. He saw assessment as building a dependency culture - where students just want to know how well they have done - and that this brings with it anxiety, which depletes capacity rather than building it. He argued that assessment should have (at least) two roles: to certificate skills and knowledge and to help students to learn. the former suggests end loaded, summative assessments and the latter suggests front loaded, formative assessment. Boud argued that we should concentrate on "building capacity for judgement" in our students - getting them to be reflective, to know what they know and don't know and to know what to do about it. This he argued would result in a learner-centred assessment regime where outcomes and capabilities were judged are which produced lifelong learners in the truest sense. He summed up by arguing that assessment should always be about the impact it has on student learning rather than anything else. If this were followed then the would be much that changed - for the good.
(see for further details of Boud's work and in particular his manifesto for assessment reform, "Assessment 2020".

Kathryn Ecclestone, Professor of Education at the University of Birmingham, gave the second keynote address. She talked somewhat provocatively about "Assessment for Inclusion". Her argument was that inclusion used to mean ways of combating social exclusion and disadvantage but that now it seems to be about trying to reduce the psychological effects of injustice and poverty. She argues that identifying students as "at risk" or vulnerable has made assessment less about stretching and challenging students and more about coaching them through the HE experience. She also argued that in the current climate if emotional outcomes became more important in the curriculum then there would be a move to try to assess them and this would be counter to the very idea of including such emotional outcomes in the first place. She finished by arguing that it was not possible to assess emotional well-being and that any attempt to do so would change the role of the tutor - one of which is to challenge students in order to stretch them, and that this might mean that they felt uncomfortable.

Sue Bloxham, Professor of Academic Practice at Cumbria gave the closing keynote address. She argued against the movement to allocate marks to specific criteria rather than looking at a piece of work holistically (see one of the workshops below). She argued that mark descriptors should be an attempt to codify something in an analytical and transparent way but too often they are used post hoc to justify a holistic, impressionistic judgement. She argued that students need to be reflexive (a recurrent them of the conference) and that there was a danger of enabling students to "paint by numbers" if everything was very specific; it also meant that tutors were having to create a set of unnatural criteria to give the impression of precision where it was not appropriate.

I also attended a workshop on the way marking grids work. This suggesting that these have a reputation for objectivity which is unearned. It was also suggested that the use of such strict criteria-referenced tools might restrict student learning as they privilege certain skills such as referencing over and over again.
A workshop on embedding coherence across programmes rang bells in that it repeated messages we are trying to promote - looking at the whole student experience; systematically disseminating and learning from examples of good practice.
A final workshop on peer feedback also reiterated ideas we are promoting around students knowing what is expected of them through clear assessment criteria and a warning that we shouldn't expect students to know what we mean when we use shorthand such as "write an essay/report on..." expectations need to be be spelt out.

There were implications in all this for the way that we work and the messages that we as an institution give to our students. The arguments being put forward were that undergraduate learning should be challenging, maybe even uncomfortable. However this was not something to duck out of but to celebrate since out of this challenge emerges intellectually stronger students who will be able to adapt more quickly to world that is emerging.