Title: Introducing Assessment
Course: Stage 3: Online and Blended Teaching > Section: 2. Focus on Assessment

Image by mohamed Hassan on Pixabay

   In Stage 1 we introduced the idea of constructive alignment. This means that assessment, learning outcomes and learning activities need to support each other well. This matters for any course regardless of how much technology is being used. Moodle offers us many tools for online assessment but we will only get good value from these if we get the fundamentals right.

   Assessment is widely recognised as a critical component of learning. Gibbs (2010) notes “Assessment makes more difference to the way that students spend their time, focus their efforts, and perform, than any other aspect of the course they study, including the teaching. If [lecturers] want to make their course work better, then there is more leverage through changing aspects of the assessment than anywhere else...”  The reading on Principles of Assessment set for after this live session covers many of the core concepts of assessment and will help to think more rigorously about assessment in your course.

Think about your current assessment practices as we look at some concepts & purposes associated with assessment, including:

- Formative: This enhances learning by providing feedback to allow students to develop the valued knowledge, skills and attitudes of the discipline. It involves  “gathering data for improving student learning” (Dixson and Worrell, p153) Because the purpose of this kind of assessment is improvement, the assessments of intermediate tasks building towards a major assignment don’t carry a lot of marks.
- Summative: This “uses data to assess how much a student knows or has retained at the completion of a learning sequence”. (Dixson and Worrell, p153) These assessments, such as end-of-course examinations, are normally high stakes and carry a lot of marks. Summative assessments inform judgments about students’ achievements for example, promotion and certification.
- Peer assessment: This is used when the lecturer involves students in assessing work by their peers. It can be formative or summative and has several advantages including:
  - Allowing for more feedback to students in large classes
  - Supporting peer learning
  - Teaching students about how assessment works
  - Helping students to think more deeply about learning

Image shared by technovore at https://www.flickr.com/photos/krillion/278869

Continue to Activity 3.2: Planning for Assessment (sync and async)