Learning through Assessment
April 28 to April 29, 2021
For our 12th Annual University of Waterloo Teaching and Learning Conference, we asked participations to qwuestion why we assess our students? Historically, assessment has been viewed as a way to see how students are progressing, a requirement for determining whether intended learning outcomes have been reached, and, in some cases, a necessity for ensuring accreditation standards are met. Increasingly, instructors are coming to view these perspectives on assessment as a lost opportunity. Thoughtful approaches to assessment can provide students with authentic, actionable feedback for improving their work; provide students with deeper insight into the purposes and process of assessment; and equip students with the skills to succeed in similar situations at university and beyond.
During our sixth annual Teaching and Learning Conference, held in 2014, we grappled with the concept of assessment of learning and started to rethink how assessment could do more than just evaluate what a learner has accomplished. Six years later, we returned to the concept of assessment, aware of the powerful learning opportunities that come with thoughtful, well-designed, student-centered assessment practices. As such, we questioned assessment’s underlying purpose and focus on the concept of assessment for learning – assessment that is learner-centered, encourages interaction and participatory learning, and provides opportunities for meaningful feedback and self-evaluation. Done well, such assessments give students more control of their learning. As educators, we too benefit from assessment practices that best support our students in their educational journeys.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic disrupting higher education, we spent the majority of 2020 learning how to teach - and in turn, assess - remotely. Assessment strategies and approaches we may have never considered before were now top of mind, and we were left to question how we can adapt and reuse what we had learnt when returning to face-to-face instruction.
Keynote - Energising Assessment and Feedback Processes in Higher Education (Dr. Kay Sambell, University of Sunderland & Dr. Sally Brown, Leeds Beckett University)
Assessment really matters to students (Brown and Knight, 1994; Boud and Falchicov, 2007; Sambell, Brown & McDowell, 1997). Pragmatically, if students want to gain an academic qualification, they are unequivocally compelled to participate in the assessment processes we design and implement. More importantly, assessment exerts a powerful influence on how students spend their time, what they study and how they approach their learning, and this has been more evident than ever in this pandemic year. As far as possible, our assessment designs need to be carefully thought-through to ensure that they exert a positive impact on students’ approaches to learning, rather than a counter-productive one, especially when face-to-face contact is restricted. This is an area in which we have been very active in our thinking in 2020-2021 and our keynote will focus on the ways in which we can now seek to energise our approaches and change higher education for good in the longer term.
Our ideal scenario is that assessment and feedback practices enhance students’ engagement in valued ways of thinking and practising (Sambell, 2013), rather than resulting in alienated and perfunctory responses in a relentless chase for marks (Wass et al., 2015). Clouder et al. (2012, p2) claim that assessment has the potential ‘… to enable students to engage with peers and tutors, to gain personal insight, to feel valued and supported and above all feel that they “fit in” as part of a learning community, and, as such, can succeed in higher education’. How can we design assessments that involve and empower our students as well as promote their learning (Brown, 2019; Sambell & Sambell, 2019)?
Dr. Kay Sambell is an independent consultant/researcher in assessment for learning in higher education and is visiting professor at the universities of Cumbria and Sunderland in the UK.
Kay is widely known internationally for her contributions to the Assessment for Learning (AfL) movement in Higher Education, which seeks to emphasize the ways in which assessment can be designed to support and developing students’ learning, as well as measure it. For over two decades she been actively involved in a range of research projects and initiatives focused on improving student learning via assessment for learning. For instance, she was Director of Assessment for Learning Enhancement in a UK Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) at Northumbria University. The Centre developed an holistic model to guide AfL practice development across the institution. The model forms the basis of the book Kay co-authored with Liz McDowell and Catherine Montgomery, Assessment for Learning in Higher Education (Routledge, 2013). This popular text, aimed at practitioners, has recently been translated into Italian by colleagues working at the University of Padua.
Kay also helped to establish and support a suite of international conferences aimed at rethinking assessment practice. She is currently President of the vibrant Assessment in Higher Education (AHE) conference series, which leads the development of assessment for learning. Her interests range broadly, however, and, she has focused on academic literacy, the first year experience and student engagement.
She has a sustained record of publications, including journal articles, student text books, research-based texts and practitioner guides. She has combined her interests in Higher Education pedagogy and SoTL with over twenty-five years’ experience as a practising lecturer in the interdisciplinary area of Childhood and Youth Studies, where she specialised in Children’s Literature. She is a UK National Teaching Fellow (2002) and a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
Dr. Sally Brown enjoys life as an Independent Consultant in Learning, Teaching and Assessment and Emerita Professor at Leeds Beckett University, where she was, until July 2010, Pro Vice Chancellor (Academic). Trained originally as a secondary school teacher in 1972, following a degree from Newcastle University she has worked for the Prison Service, in Further Education, for the Institute for Learning and Teaching (now part of Advance HE) and for a number of other higher education institutions.
She is probably best-known for her extensive publications on teaching, learning and particularly assessment, many written with her husband, Professor Phil Race, which sell globally and for her keynotes and workshops in these areas. Her latest book is Professionalism in practice: key directions in higher education learning, teaching and assessment (with Kay Sambell and Linda Graham), London, Palgrave published in 2017.
She has held Visiting Professorships at the University of the Sunshine Coast, Central Queensland and James Cook in Australia, at Robert Gordon University (Aberdeen) and the Universities of Plymouth, South Wales and Liverpool John Moores. She currently still serves in this capacity at Edge Hill. She holds Honorary Doctorates from Plymouth University (joint with Phil Race), Kingston University, Bournemouth University and Edinburgh Napier University. She is also a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, is a Staff and Educational Development Association (SEDA) Senior Fellow and a UK National Teaching Fellow.
Nowadays she still continues with a little consultancy in the UK and Europe, pro bono mentoring, volunteering at her local primary school listening to struggling readers and telling stories, and spending a lot of time with her grandchildren.
Keynote - A Triad Approach for Assessment in Blended and Online Courses (Dr. Norm Vaughan, Mount Royal University)
A number of educational researchers have stated that assessment drives approaches to learning in higher education (Biggs, 1998; Hedberg & Corrent-Agostinho, 1999; Herman & Linn, 2013; Marton & Saljo, 1984; Ramsden, 2003; Thistlethwaite, 2006). Entwistle (2000) indicates that the design of the assessment activity and the associated feedback can influence the type of learning that takes place in a course or program. For example, standardized tests with minimal feedback can lead to memorization and a surface approach to learning while collaborative group projects can encourage dialogue, richer forms of feedback, and deeper modes of learning.
With the pivot to blended and online courses during the Covid-19 era the question arises about how these types of learning environments can support meaningful assessment practices. Garrison and Vaughan (2008) define blended learning “as the organic integration of thoughtfully selected and complementary face-to-face and online approaches and technologies” (p.169). Educational research studies have demonstrated that a blended approach to learning and teaching has benefits for both students and faculty members (Vaughan, 2007). Students indicate that blended learning provides them with greater time flexibility and improved learning outcomes while faculty suggest that blended courses create enhanced opportunities for teacher-student interaction, increased student engagement in learning, added flexibility in the teaching and learning environment, and opportunities for continuous improvement.
The focus of this keynote session will be on exploring how digital technologies can be used to extend what we’ve learned through the Covid-19 pandemic to blended teaching opportunities in the future, specifically with regards to the design of a triad-approach for student assessment (Vaughan, 2014). This triad-approach consists of self-reflection, peer feedback, and teacher/expert assessment strategies and techniques (Vaughan, 2013).
Dr. Norm Vaughan is a Professor in the Department of Education, Faculty of Health, Community Education at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta. Dr. Vaughan’s teaching background includes graduate and undergraduate courses in educational technology, K-12 education, technical training in petroleum industry and English as a second language. He has co-authored Teaching in Blended Learning Environments: Creating and Sustaining Communities of Inquiry and also Blended Learning in Higher Education. Dr. Vaughan is also the co-founder of the Blended Online Design Network.
Igniting our Practice
Dr. Veronica Austen (she/her) is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at St. Jerome’s University, where she is also Associate Dean. With research specialities in contemporary Canadian and Caribbean literatures, she is currently completing a SSHRC-funded project which explores how representations of the visual arts are deployed in contemporary Canadian literature to navigate experiences of (un)belonging. In 2006, during her Ph.D. at the University of Waterloo, she was the recipient of the Centre for Teaching Excellence's inaugural Certificate in University Teaching Award. Her undergraduate and graduate teaching covers various areas of contemporary literary studies, including Canadian and postcolonial literatures, representations of the law, and discourses related to the act of eating.
In her Igniting our Practice session, Dr. Austen addressed the importance of grappling with “difficulty” by showing why she concludes her first-year Introduction to Literary Studies course with texts that frustrate a reader’s desire for comprehension. As she demonstrated using an excerpt from M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!, enabling students to be comfortable with a lack of understanding can encourage them to be open to learning, to acknowledge their own positionality and what they can bring to a conversation, and thus to develop strategies that allow them to confront rather than turn away from that which they find difficult.
Dr. Rob Hill has been a faculty member of the Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Waterloo since 2003. During this time he has taught a lot of introductory first year physics courses, introductory quantum mechanics and also material science. In Jan 2020, he was appointed as the department’s Teaching Fellow and has very recently taken on the role of Senior Teaching Fellow for the Faculty of Science. He has a very keen interest in establishing student-centred teaching approaches in his courses and supporting the adoption of them broadly across the Faculty. Rob also has a research group that studies the properties of quantum materials at temperatures very close to the absolute zero of temperature.
Dr. Brenda Lee is a faculty member and undergraduate advisor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Waterloo. She has taught a wide range of courses, some of which include introductory first year physics courses, biophysics, computational physics, electricity and magnetism, as well as calculus.
She is passionate about teaching, and uses her expertise in biophysics and biomedical nanotechnology to promote the importance of interdisciplinary studies in the classroom and to encourage the application of learned concepts to the real world through interactive learning experiences. Outside of the classroom, she is actively involved in biophysics research related to lipid-protein interactions related to biological processes and diseases.
In their Igniting our Practice session, Brenda and Rob explained how they used group work in a large 1st year Physics class to meet the dual challenges of student engagement and assessment in a remote teaching environment.
Resources
Contact
Visit our official conference website to learn about current and future conferences.
For questions about the conference, please contact Kyle Scholz at the Centre for Teaching Excellence.