Too many parents teachers and students have a very narrow perspective on assessment. It is frequently seen as a measure of success or failure; but in reality, it should be understood that there are many ways to assess and many reasons for assessing.
Assessment is, and should be, a way of revising the things a student learns. By revisiting their work, and being assessed; the learning is reinforced or strengthened, and often given greater context and meaning.
Exams are often used as a stand-in for academic rigour. Students and teachers across secondary and tertiary education talk about courses in the context of the exam: the exam will be hard; the exams are worth 35% and 45% of your grade; the exam will take hours; make sure you pay attention to this, it will definitely be on the exam.
Course designers and developers look at exams as only part of the academic rigour equation. They’re part of a larger assessment tool kit, designed to assess the in-common elements of a program. This renders them especially useful during schooling and some areas of post-secondary education, especially in sectors with a clear industry standard and/or licensing requirements. The key word here is common: exams are standardised, testing knowledge everyone is required to have in a predetermined set of conditions. They do not account for necessary specialisation or real-world conditions. Role-play based exams, used in the health care industry, are still a simulation. Exams provide important feedback to course developers and designers, assessors, and industry. But they are a limited tool — exams test what educators refer to as knowledge and understanding, but they do not always assess student ability to apply principles in new situations, derive creative solutions, or think in new ways. In fact, many exams — and courses developed around exams — discourage creativity and flexible thinking. Rote learning is easier to test.
Yet the employment market follows the economic principles of specialisation, with industries requiring increasingly specialised skilled labour. This means that more and more students need to specialise within their industries — and specialisation is something general and survey courses can’t teach. There are specialty courses available, but it is not economically feasible to run enough courses to meet the specialty requirements of each student. Helping students develop the skills necessary to research, analyse, interpret, and create within their areas ultimately creates a higher degree of skilled labour. This means integrating tasks and assessment tools that encourage and develop these skills is vital to both the economy and the learner. This type of assessment is usually completed independently, and focussed on research and application.
Assessment tools based on research, investigation, and application are more time- and resource-intensive to develop and assess, but are often better indicators of student learning and application. Educational taxonomies —tools and spectra that help us think about a continuum of learning and what constitutes both knowledge and comprehension of a topic — abound. Most use some form of creation, creativity, synthesis, or flexibility as a marker for deep comprehension. This is because educators look at learning as a continuum. They are concerned with empowering the student, with supplying the necessary tools for the student to acquire knowledge, develop understanding, and apply and derive new principles independently.
The way students learn varies. There is a distinct difference in the ways students learn and the ways students prefer to learn. Designing assessments that cater to both aspects of learning, while helping students develop their own learning toolkits, requires a strong investment in developing assessment types and infrastructure. Useful additional assessments include research and reporting tasks, essays and dissertations, meta analysis, sector analysis, and design. These assessments also help students develop specialisations within their industry.
Academic rigour must be gauged by assessments as a whole. Exams are only part of the assessment puzzle.
