Expanding what and how we assess: Going beyond the content

Barbara de la Harpe
Curtin Business School
Curtin University of Technology

What do we, as university teachers, hope will be the learning outcomes for students who successfully complete our courses? We want our graduates to have not only knowledge and understanding of content, but also a positive attitude to learning and themselves as learners, a repertoire of effective learning strategies, the ability to reflect on their learning and a willingness to continue learning throughout life. Traditionally, however, courses tend to focus on the content of the discipline and not on these other outcomes of study. This emphasis is frequently reflected in assessment tasks, which focus on what students have learned and not on how and why they have learned or their feelings about learning and themselves as learners. In this paper, we outline the rationale for expanding assessment tasks to include these other important aspects of learning. We provide examples to illustrate how teachers in any discipline can expand their assessment tasks to include these aspects. Finally, we reflect on the importance of going beyond the content in order to help students to be more effective learners.

Going beyond the content

Traditionally, however, most university courses tend to focus more on discipline content than on the 'skill and will' of learning. This is not surprising since many staff perceive themselves to be content experts and may find their role as teachers challenging. As Sutherland (1996, p. 91) points out,

[t]he reasons that faculty find it difficult to assess non-content outcomes are the same as the reasons they find it difficult to consider using new teaching approaches. Faculty are experts in their field of study. They have spent their professional lives developing skill and confidence in their abilities as chemists, sociologists, rhetoricians, and art historians. Their training and focus has been on content, and few have been supervised or mentored in teaching and evaluating students.

[w]e don't pay a lot of attention right now to giving students feedback on their progress as learners. Mostly, students get grades that tell them how they have done relative to their classmates. That information is not useful feedback on their progress as learners, nor does it do anything to help students develop skills for self assessment.

Expanding assessment

• cognitive aspects such as student use of learning strategies such as memorisation, note making, summarising, identifying main ideas and categorising information, as well as time management, use of resources and help seeking;

• metacognitive aspects such as student awareness and knowledge of the learning process, the learning environment and themselves as learners, as well as how they go about planning, monitoring, evaluating and adapting their learning;

• motivational aspects such as student interest in and attitude to learning, their level of confidence as learners and their expectations of the outcomes of their learning;

• affective aspects such as student feelings about the learning task and themselves as learners as well as how they manage both their positive and negative feelings.

Research suggests that the skills for lifelong learning are best developed in context by the discipline teacher with special attention being paid to the role of assessment. In fact, as McKeachie, Pintrich, Lin and Smith (1986, p. 1) point out,

...every course should help students become aware of strategies for learning and problem solving. An explicit goal of education throughout the curriculum should be to facilitate the development both of learning strategies and problem solving skills and of effective strategies for their use.

Examples of assessment tasks

The MSLQ (Pintrich, Smith, Garcia & McKeachie, 1991) is a standardised 81 item Likert-type self report instrument designed to measure students' motivational orientations and learning strategy use. It consists of two sections - Motivation and Learning. The Motivation section is made up of three scales namely, value, expectancy and affective components. The Learning Strategies section is also made up of three scales namely, cognitive, metacognitive, and resource management. The scales are designed to be modular and thus, can be used together or singly, to fit specific needs. The full MSLQ takes approximately 20-30 minutes to complete. See Appendix 1 for examples of items.

A way to assess metacognitive aspects of learning is to ask students to keep a personal learning log in which they describe their learning and reflect on their learning experiences in term of how they have changed or intend to change or not change the way they learn. Students can be helped to do the task by being given opportunities to discuss with peers and the teacher the value of keeping a log, their goals for their logs, and criteria for assessing their logs. This activity can be assessed in a number of ways. For example, students can submit three extracts from their log together with a reflective comment justifying the selection and its significance for their understanding of the subject and themselves as learners. This task could carry up to 20 percent of the total mark for the course. Another way of assessing the activity is to include a question in the final exam asking students to describe what they have learned about effective ways of learning the subject and/or how they have changed as learners over the semester.

Learning logs have been used to foster and assess students' cognitive and metacognitive strategy use (Alderman, Klein, Seeley, & Sanders, 1993; Dart & Clarke, 1991). Learning logs or diaries have been found to help students evaluate their learning, develop more sophisticated conceptions of learning, and stimulate critical thinking (Hartley, 1998).

A way to assess how students feel about a learning task and themselves as learners is to ask students, as part of an assignment that assesses some aspect of the content, to complete the Zuckerman Affect Adjective Checklist (AACL) at the start, during and end of the assignment. In a section of the assignment, students include a graph plotting their feelings and a brief comment explaining their feelings and any changes over time.

The AACL (Docking & Thornton, 1979; Zuckerman, 1960) is a self report instrument designed to measure anxiety. It consists of 21 key adjectives embedded in a total of 60 with various affective connotations, arranged in alphabetical order. Respondents select the words that describe how they generally feel about a particular situation. The AACL takes about two minutes to complete and is easy to use. See appendix 2 for the AACL.

These examples show how, with some minor adaptation of existing assessment tasks and a bit of creative thinking, teachers can expand their assessment to include a focus on content as well as the skill and will involved in learning. There are many other assessment tools that can be used to expand the focus of assessment. Some of these are shown below. For a more in depth discussion of such tools, see de la Harpe and Radloff (2000).

Importance of expanding assessment

Using these types of assessment tasks also helps teachers, since, as Pintrich and Johnson (1990, p. 83) note, "...the information generated by these instruments can enlighten faculty members about the general cognitive and motivational characteristics of their students". It provides teachers with information about how students develop as learners and about the impact that the curriculum, and their instructional and assessment activities have on students. This information, in turn, can be used in designing and planning curricula that foster and value both content knowledge and skills.

In this paper, we have presented a rationale for expanding assessment to include aspects of learning that are valued, shown that it is possible for teachers in any discipline to adapt their assessment tasks to do so, and highlighted the benefits for students and staff. It is now up to us as teachers to expand the assessment horizon and to harness its power in order to enhance teaching and learning.

References

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Appendix 1

Appendix 2