A handful of propositions for harnessing purposeful assessment
Professor Sam Elkington, Professor of Learning & Teaching, Teesside University, UK
Understanding the ‘hybridisation’ of higher education provision is now a critical aspect in grasping the shifting requirements of contemporary learning environments, blurring the boundaries between distinct contexts of learning and their activities (Goodyear, 2020; Lamb et al., 2022). This raises critical questions about how best to position educational assessment to be purposeful in and for student learning development both now and in the future. The proliferation of digital learning tools and technologies has hastened movement toward seeking greater flexibility, inclusivity, and authenticity in assessment. Crucially, students are already using the affordances of the varied digital ecologies they are part of to discover and construct knowledge that is meaningful to their individual learning needs, circumstances, and aspirations. Add to this the growing accessibility of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools, and we begin to see how designing assessment to support future authentic learning experiences will necessarily involve negotiating an increasingly complex set of practices, technologies, and resources.
In this talk, Sam argues that a new kind of assessment system is call for – one which is not biased only toward (supposedly) stable performative measures of student success; but is instead set up to meet students where they are in their learning journeys, recognising diversity and valuing difference(s), as well as embracing the need to be innovative in the face of traditionally resistant and inflexible assessment regimes. Through the prism of a handful of propositions, Sam considers the latest research evidence, alongside a range of practice strategies for devising inclusive, authentic, and flexible assessment designs and practice, to demonstrate how educators might effectively and with confidence move assessment forward into increasingly complex learning environments in ways that prepare students for a multitude of future possibilities. Core to such approaches, suggests Sam, is the requirement that educators think more pragmatically (at the level of practice and action) about the function, form, and flow of the assessment arrangements they choose to deploy. The challenge this represents is one of understanding and adapting a wider repertoire of approaches and practices in assessment to encompass new and multiple contexts that are no longer experienced as separate, virtual, or other in students’ higher education experience. This means taking steps to offer students a variety of different ways in which to not only understand and take hold of their learning, but also help them to continuously connect what they are learning to the word around them – ideas to thinking, principles to problems, theory to practice, learning to life.
References
Goodyear, P. (2020) ‘Design and co‐configuration for hybrid learning: Theorising the practices of learning space design’, British Journal of Educational Technology, 51(4), pp.1045-1060. doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.12925.
Lamb, J., Carvalho, L., Gallagher, M. and Knox, J. (2022) ‘The Postdigital Learning Spaces of Higher Education’, Postdigital Science Education, 4, pp. 1–12. doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-021-00279-9.
Biography
Profile: Samuel Elkington — Teesside University’s Research Portal
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