Spheres of Influence: Ventures and Visions in Educational Development*

3-6 July, 2002
The University of Western Australia
Perth, Western Australia

Abstract

The tyranny of assessment for grading

Janice Orrell, Flinders University, Australia

Research has provided considerable evidence that it is the assessment of students' learning outcomes, not students' preferred learning styles that most influence the nature and quality of learning attainment. This presentation will outline the results of a study that examined assessors' thinking while they judged their own students' learning products. The data described will illustrate the focus of assessors thinking while they assessed their thought processes and the ways that they managed their own fears of fallibility and inconsistency. This data provides evidence that many assessors function within a private milieu of uncertainty while maintaining a public discourse of certitude.

The data shows that the prevailing culture surrounding grading student learning is defensive and is caught up in the power relationships between learner and assessor. The task of grading is largely approached as a 'natural' task that merely requires expertise in the knowledge domain. Alternatively, this presentation advocates a 'problematised approach. Such an approach requires assessors to adopt a disposition of critical self-reflection and an explicit, concrete articulation of qualities of the intended learning outcomes to be demonstrated.

Key words:
Assessment of learning; Teacher thinking; Supporting learning

Objectives, outcomes and activities:

To explore the limitations and constraints caused by a educational culture that is dominated by assessment for grading;
To explore the fallibility and limitations of all judgements of students' learning outcomes;
To consider alternative approaches to assessment of learning that generate a culture of learning to learn.

Janice Orrell has a PhD in Educational Psychology and is the Academic Coordinator in the Staff Development and Training Unit. Since 1997 she has developed an institution wide academic development program in teaching and research. Her major field of scholarship is comparing assessors' thinking while assessing student learning products with their personal, practical beliefs about assessment. Another field of scholarship is teaching and assessing work-place learning and transfer of learning between clinical contexts and classrooms.

Contact: Janice Orrell, email: janice.orrell@flinders.edu.au