Assessment for learning

This resource forms part of a set of resources written by Karen Clegg (Graduate Training Unit, University of York) which are designed to help law teachers to adapt and improve their assessment practice.

Here, Karen looks at the use of reflection, self and peer assessment to encourage ‘assessment for learning’. See related pages in the toolbar on the right to view Karen’s other assessment resources. Links to examples and tools for use in the classroom are included, as well as prompt questions to help you think about how to use the case examples in your own teaching.

In this section we look at ways of promoting student learning through assessment. In order to achieve this students need to experience assessment not as a ‘bolt-on’ activity that happens after teaching, but as an integral and integrated part of the learning experience. The Assessment for Learning CETL (AfL) based at the University of Northumbria has developed Six conditions for AfL through a learning environment that:

1. Emphasises authenticity and complexity in the content and methods of assessment rather than reproduction of knowledge and reductive measurement.
2. Uses high stakes summative assessment rigorously but sparingly rather than as the main driver for learning.
3. Offers students extensive opportunities to engage in the kinds of tasks that develop and demonstrate their learning, thus building their confidence and capabilities before they are summatively assessed.
4. Is rich in feedback derived from formal mechanisms, for example tutor comments on assignments, student self review logs.
5. Is rich in informal feedback, for example peer review of draft writing, collaborative project work, which provides students with a continuous flow of feedback on ‘how they are doing’.
6. Develops students’ abilities to direct their own learning, evaluate their own progress and attainments and support the learning of others.

Prompt questions

• Does your learning environment reflect the conditions above? If not, what small changes could you make to better align your practice with the conditions.
• Can you adapt the conditions to provide a framework for encouraging AfL in your teaching?
• Could you conduct focus groups with students to give them the opportunity to highlight which conditions they would most like met and suggest ways in which this might be achieved (further involving the students in the assessment process)?

The AfL website includes a number of examples of AfL in practice that illustrate how assessment has been used in different contexts to meet the six conditions. Not all Schools at Northumbria are involved in the project yet, and unfortunately there are no examples in Law, but there’s no reason why you shouldn’t use their work to develop your own.

Encouraging self and peer assessment

Self and peer assessment are primarily ways of improving learner confidence and autonomy, and developing ‘learning to learn’ skills that will help students advance understanding of their subject. If in your law school you work with Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs) or mentor a new member of academic staff, you will probably recognise that one of their main concerns is about assessing student work and providing ‘good’ feedback to students. There is a belief, often perpetuated by more experienced academics, that assessment is an exact science carried out by ‘experts’. However, unless you are assessing a multiple choice examination or a test in which there are clear right/wrong answers, this simply isn’t true. Assessment is at best subjective, relying on judgement and interpretation.

On the whole new academics and GTAs relax a little when they realise being good at assessment isn’t something you are born with, but a skill that can be developed. To help new law teachers understand how to assess it is common practice to provide an induction that includes familiarising themselves with the regulations, showing them assessment criteria and illustrating how to use examples and exemplars of good work such that they understand and can recognise an excellent piece of work against something average. We can easily help our students in the same way. With practice all students can make judgements about the quality of their work, and engaging them in self assessment early on in their academic career (first year ideally) means they will fully grasp what constitutes quality and have a better idea of how to do better.

Give students the opportunity to assess their own work against explicit criteria and to highlight to a tutor what they think they need help with – this automatically focuses the feedback to where it is most needed. It also means that students are engaged with the feedback and are likely to do something with it rather than just read the grade.

Alverno College in the US is well known amongst assessment circles for having redeveloped their entire curriculum around the idea of continuous self and peer assessment. The approach is what they call ‘assessment-as-learning’. From day one students are encouraged to assess their own written work and performance. Research into the approach showed that:

Students who analysed their performance in relation to criteria for judgement could readily retrieve and apply criteria to a particular performance, and so became able to improve or innovate in a situation quite different from the original college-based setting or examination.

— (Mentowski in Bryan & Clegg, 2006)

In other words, self assessment helped these students to transfer their learning to different contexts. Self and peer assessment can and should be seen as part of a toolkit for developing reflective autonomous learning.

Resources

Developing reflective practice in legal education – gives an overview of the value of self assessment and reflection in law and details a number of examples of reflection being used in law schools
Ensuring successful assessment – gives an overview of self assessment in the context of law (see in particular section 3)

Last Modified: 4 June 2010