An assessment arms race and its fallout: high-stakes grading and the case for slow scholarship

Harland, Tony; McLean, Andrew; Wass, Rob; Miller, Ellen; Sim, Kwong Nui

doi:10.1080/02602938.2014.931927

Cited by 67 publications

(65 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…Some students mentioned that they would not have kept up with the coursework had the intermediate assessment not been there. Students in the paper by Harland et al (2015) also feared that they would not make effective use of independent study time and therefore appreciated frequent assessments to serve as a guide for studying.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Furthermore, competition arose, with non-graded study activities losing out. Harland et al (2015) called this an "assessment arms race". The notion of an assessment arms race is backed up by findings from Vos (1992) who found that students in the Netherlands spent a maximum of seven hours on studying.…”

Section: Negative Effects Of Intermediate Assessmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Harland et al (2015) concluded that assessing students frequently for grades led to strategic behaviour, because students were mainly focused on getting grades and not on gaining a deeper understanding of the material. Furthermore, competition arose, with non-graded study activities losing out.…”

Section: Negative Effects Of Intermediate Assessmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Teacher and student perceptions of intermediate assessment in higher education

Day

Blankenstein

Westenberg

et al. 2017

Educational Studies

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Negative Effects Of Intermediate Assessmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Teacher and student perceptions of intermediate assessment in higher education

Day

Blankenstein

Westenberg

et al. 2017

Educational Studies

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“…Yet, if students are to be prepared for learning throughout life, they must learn to regulate their own learning as they progress through higher education. A programme-long portfolio, which students can shape and edit through the length of the programme, offers them a chance to take ownership of their learning over a period of time, creating a space for 'slow scholarship' (Harland et al 2015).…”

Section: Audiences and Partnersmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Connected Curriculum for Higher Education

Fung¹

2017

133

102

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Spotlights is a short monograph series for authors wishing to make new or defining elements of their work accessible to a wide audience. The series will provide a responsive forum for researchers to share key develop ments in their discipline and reach across disciplinary boundaries. The series also aims to support a diverse range of approaches to undertaking research and writing it. A Connected Curriculum for Higher EducationDilly Fung This book is published under a Creative Commons 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: Foreword: Energising an InstitutionIt is customary, in a Foreword, to begin by sketching a large context in which the book in question might be comprehended and then perhaps to pick out one or two of its key features and end by affirming the value of the book in front of the reader. On this occasion, I shall reverse this order. Let me start, therefore, by asserting that A Connected Curriculum for Higher Education is both a splendid book and, for all those who care about higher education and universities, a crucially important book.That assertion actually contains a number of suggestions on my part. One is that this book offers important insights separately for higher education and for universities, that is to say both for students and their learning on the one hand and for universities as organisations on the other hand. Every page is packed with insights and practical suggestions for advancing students' learning and their wider experience: that is immediately evident. Furthermore, in the Connected Curriculum idea, there are the makings of a coherent vision and plan of action for institutional transformation.At the centre of the Connected Curriculum idea lies the hope and, indeed, the demonstration that it is possible, within universities, to improve the relationship between teaching and research. In a sense, of course, this thought should never have needed to be uttered. For 200 years, since the modern idea of the university was born at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, it has been taken for granted in many quarters that a distinguishing feature of universities is that they be institutions that not only are spaces of both teaching and research but also that those two functions are intimately intertwined. However, for the past three decades or so, huge forces (national and global) have tended to pull research and teaching apart; and so the matter of their relationship has become a matter of wide concern.It might be tempting to address this matter in a rather limited way, looking at the actual relationships between research and teachingwhich, characteristically, may be expected to vary even within the same F o re wo rD: en er g isi n g a n i ns t i t u t...

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“…This risks irritating students, so a tutor has to be confident that the learning gain is worth the trade-off or that students will eventually see the benefits. This pragmatic approach also goes against the principle that assessment supports learning more when it is low-stakes, with the risk that forcing students to engage can lead to an "arms race" of tutors competing against each other's modules for student attention (Harland et al 2015).…”

Section: Feedback In Academic Writing Support Servicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Limitations of Corrective Feedforward: A Call for Resubmission Practices to become Learning-oriented

Carver

2017

JOAW

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As part of well-planned formative assessment, feedback can help students to understand the demands of a summative assessment task, evaluate their current level of performance, and then find ways to close the gap. As students take a more active role in this process, their feedback can be thought of as becoming 'feedforward' since it serves a specific purpose and drives student action. As the value of formative assessment design is becoming emphasised in higher education, summative assessment practices need to be re-evaluated in terms of how well they support learning as opposed to just supporting valid judgements of student performance. However, despite significant discussion of Assessment for Learning and Learning-Oriented Assessment, resubmission practices are largely overlooked even though resubmission can be a key event in whether students are retained.As part of a learning support department's effort to provide effective feedback on academic writing, students referred for support were offered two types of feedback: one was simple correction, the other was in-depth dialogic feedback which followed "feedback for learning" guidance (Askew and Lodge 2000). Student engagement with the two types of feedback was analysed by looking at the changes students made to their work and feedback from their subject tutor (including the resubmission grade). The tutor's feedback was also analysed to see if any intentions for the resubmission task could be inferred.Results suggest that corrective feedback is highly efficient in enabling students to pass resubmissions and that more in-depth feedback is much less efficient. This paper highlights some of the ways in which resubmission practices can unknowingly encourage surface approaches, and suggests some ideas for how learning support can better align with subject tutors to enable resubmission to become more learning-oriented.

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An assessment arms race and its fallout: high-stakes grading and the case for slow scholarship

Cited by 67 publications

References 25 publications

Teacher and student perceptions of intermediate assessment in higher education

Teacher and student perceptions of intermediate assessment in higher education

A Connected Curriculum for Higher Education

Limitations of Corrective Feedforward: A Call for Resubmission Practices to become Learning-oriented

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