Learning assessment

The Assessment for Learning is the process of seeking and interpreting evidence for use by learners and their teachers to decide where the learners are in their learning, where they need to go and how best to get there. Nine Principles of Good Practice for Assessing for Learning:

i) The assessment of student learning begins with educational values. Assessment is not an
end in itself but a vehicle for educational improvement. Its effective practice, then, begins with and enacts a vision of the kinds of learning we most value for students and strive to help them
achieve. Educational values should drive not only what we choose to assess but also how we do so.

ii) Assessment is most effective when it reflects an understanding of learning:
as multidimensional, integrated, and revealed in performance over time. Learning is a complex process. It entails not only what students know but what they can do with what they know; it
involves not only knowledge and abilities but values, attitudes, and habits of mind that affect both academic success and performance beyond the classroom. Assessment should reflect these
understandings by employing a diverse array of methods, including those that call for actual performance, using them over time so as to reveal change, growth, and increasing degrees of integration.

iii) Assessment works best when the programs it seeks to improve have clear, explicitly stated purposes. Assessment is a goal-oriented process. It entails comparing educational performance with educational purposes and expectations -- those derived from the institution's
mission, from faculty intentions in program and course design, and from knowledge of students' own goals.

iv) Assessment requires attention to outcomes but also an equally to the experiences that lead to those outcomes. Information about outcomes is of high importance; where students "end up" matters greatly. But to improve outcomes, we need to know about student experience along the way -- about the curricula, teaching, and kind of student effort that lead to particular outcomes. Assessment can help us understand which students learn best under what conditions; with such knowledge comes the capacity to improve the whole of their learning.

v) Assessment works best when it is ongoing not episodic. Assessment is a process whose power is cumulative. Though isolated, "one-shot" assessment can be better than none, improvement is best fostered when assessment entails a linked series of activities undertaken over time. This may mean tracking the process of individual students, or of cohorts of students; it may mean collecting the same examples of student performance or using the same instrument semester after semester. The point is to monitor progress toward intended goals in a spirit of continuous improvement.

vi) Assessment fosters wider improvement when representatives from across the educational community are involved. Student learning is a campus-wide responsibility, and assessment is a way of enacting that responsibility. Thus, while assessment efforts may start small, the aim over time is to involve people from across the educational community. Faculty play an especially important role, but assessment's questions can't be fully addressed without participation by student-affairs educators, librarians, administrators, and students. Assessment may also involve individuals from beyond the campus (alumni/ae, trustees, employers) whose experience can enrich the sense of appropriate aims and standards for learning.

vii) Assessment makes a difference when it begins with issues of use and illuminates questions that people really care about. Assessment recognizes the value of information in the process of improvement. But to be useful, information must be connected to issues or questions that people really care about. This implies assessment approaches that produce evidence that
relevant parties will find credible, suggestive, and applicable to decisions that need to be made. It means thinking in advance about how the information will be used, and by whom. The point of
assessment is not to gather data and return "results"; it is a process that starts with the questions of decision-makers, that involves them in the gathering and interpreting of data, and that informs
and helps guide continuous improvement.

viii) Assessment is most likely to lead to improvement when it is part of a larger set of conditions that promote change. Assessment alone changes little. Its greatest contribution comes on campuses where the quality of teaching and learning is visibly valued and worked at. On such campuses, the push to improve educational performance is a visible and primary goal of leadership; improving the quality of undergraduate education is central to the institution's
planning, budgeting, and personnel decisions.

ix) Assessment through educators meet responsibilities to students and to the public. There is a compelling public stake in education. As educators, we have a responsibility to the publicsnthat support or depend on us to provide information about the ways in which our students meet goals and expectations. But that responsibility goes beyond the reporting of such information; our deeper obligation -- to ourselves, our students, and society -- is to improve. Those to whom educators are accountable have a corresponding obligation to support such attempts at improvement. There are ten Categories of Assessment Techniques.

I) Assessing Prior Knowledge, Recall, and Understanding Techniques in this category assess content learning; that is, how well students are learning the content of the particular subject they are studying.
II) Assessing Skill in Analysis and Critical Thinking Techniques in this category assess procedural learning; that is, students' skills at analyzing
information or questions or problems to understand more fully or solve more effectively.
III) Assessing Skill in Synthesis and Critical Thinking
Techniques in this category stimulate students to create, and allow faculty to assess original intellectual products that result from a synthesis of the course content and the students' intelligence, judgment, knowledge, and skills.
.IV) Assessing Skill in Problem Solving
Techniques in this category allow faculty to assess and promote problemsolving skills of various kinds.
V) Assessing Skill in Application and Performance Techniques in this category assess conditional knowledge; that is, students' understanding of when and where to apply what has been learned. VI)Assessing Students' Awareness of Their Attitudes and Values
Techniques in this category are designed to help faculty better understand and more effectively promote the development of attitudes, opinions, values, and self-awareness. VII)Assessing Students' Self-Awareness as Learners Techniques in this category focus on students' awareness of goals, interests, or ways of learning.
VIII) Assessing Course-Related Learning and Study Skills, Strategies, and Behaviors Techniques in this category focus attention on the ways students carry out their work; that is, the
actual behaviors in which they engage as they try to learn.
IX)Assessing Learner Reactions to Teachers and Teaching
Techniques in this category provide context-specific and teacher-specific feedback that can be used to improve teaching.
X) Assessing Learner Reactions to Class Activities, Assignments, and Materials
Techniques in this category are designed to provide faculty information that will help improve course materials and assignments. Some assessment methods can also cover more than one level of learning at the same time, depending upon how well the objective or learning outcome has been written.