Course-Focused Assessment What, Why, How?

1. Course-Focused Assessment
What, Why, How?
Teaching Essentials: https://blogs.shu.ac.uk/teaching/
Course-focused Practice: https://blogs.shu.ac.uk/cfp

2.  Over-emphasis on assessment of learning
 Diverse and large student cohorts
 Difficulty of seeing 'bigger pictures' and purpose
 Poor attendance, engagement and sense of course belonging and becoming
 Student disengagement in study activity outside of class
 Difficulties in providing clear, timely, meaningful and supportive feedback
 Poor student engagement with feedback and its application to improve learning
We need to focus on the student’s course experience
Assessment challenges

3.  Student-centred approach to designing the course and its assessment
 Designing with a holistic view of assessment and feedback
 Driven by course learning outcomes - it’s about who the student will become
 Makes connections across modules, enhancing course meaning and motivation
 Flexible to suit the course context, subject matter and attributes
Nb. It is sometimes called Programme Level Assessment, Programme Focussed
Assessment, TESTA, PASS, integrated assessment, etc.
What is
Course-Focused Assessment?

4.  Course satisfaction comes from being immersed and intrinsically motivated -
difficult to achieve in module-centric delivery
 Avoids duplication across modules
 Allows for connections through levels
 Avoids assessment bunching
 Promotes consistency of learning experience, i.e. not meaning standardisation
 Support for learning outcomes that are extra-modular
 Integrated approach: supports ‘slow learning’ and student ‘becoming’ -
supports individuals to aspire and adopt the identity of their discipline
Why adopt it?

5.  Modularity limits what can be assessed, and how
 Modularity tends to fixate on skills delivery and surface engagement - higher
order outcomes easily overlooked in delivery and engagement
 "Without integration, synthesis is largely left to the student and not
assessed” (Price, 2012)
 Difficult to produce feedforward - module-focused assessment can result in a
dead-end feedback experience
 Integrate skills and attributes within an experiential view of learning
Why adopt it?

6.  Course team approach - co-operative design and supportive delivery
 Relational design - modules are designed in relation to each other
 Being course-centred - Start by asking: "What is the course about? What are we trying
to do? What do our students need to become?"
 Creates oversight - knowing what is being taught in other modules, and when
 Assessment methods fit the overall course assessment and feedback strategy
 Learning driven - a focus on appropriate formative and summative methods for the
course and module content
 Context for learning is coherent - e.g. establishing professional learning scenarios to
foster professional practices, attitudes and values creates an authentic learning
narrative
What’s it mean in practice?

7. References
Boud, D. (2000) Sustainable Assessment: Rethinking assessment for the learning society,
Studies in Continuing Education, 22: 2, 151 —167
Jessop, T. and Maleckar, B. (2014). The Influence of disciplinary assessment patterns on student
learning: a comparative study. Studies in Higher Education. Published Online 27 August 2014
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03075079.2014.943170
Jessop, T. , El Hakim, Y. and Gibbs, G. (2014) The whole is greater than the sum of its parts: a
large-scale study of students’ learning in response to different assessment patterns. Assessment
and Evaluation in Higher Education. 39(1) 73-88
Russell, M. & Bygate, D. (2010). Assessment for learning: An introduction to the ESCAPE project.
Blended Learning in Pracice, March 2010, pp. 38-48.