Activities and results
Intellectual outputs

IO2. Toolkit for assessment of students in FC and WBL

Start date: 2021-05-01
End date: 2022-05-31
IO2 leader: Delft University of Technology


Assessment is an essential part of learning. Meaningful assessment can lead student learning and positively influence the fulfillment of planned learning outcomes, but also vice versa.
In that respect, teachers have to use assessment methods directly related to the planned learning outcomes as advised by constructive alignment (Biggs & Tang, 2007). In the context of WBL, it is necessary to assess projects and the level of skills development, and in the context of FCs, where teacher and student interaction needs to be facilitated, peer evaluation should be especially ensured.
At the same time assessment has to support a deep approach to learning. Terms and concepts of deep and superficial learning were introduced and developed (Marton & Säljö, 1976), and appropriately developed for higher education (Entwistle & Ramsden, 2015).
Council conclusions on countering the COVID-19 crisis in education and training 2020/C 212 I/03 stated that one of the greatest challenges has been how to manage assessment and grading. 
In pilot research performed as a part of needs analysis (FOI, SoM, Unizg2020) students pointed out that we should work even more to prevent cheating on exams. As a rule, assessment tasks that are relevant and interesting are more difficult to copy/cheat because students are also inclined to create such tasks independently. However, the teacher needs to put more effort into preparing and evaluating them. Assessment methods that can be reliably conducted online without extended additional teacher control over the situation when the assessment is conducted live are also those that are designed so that the tasks are focused on the essential, relevant, interesting and require an in-depth approach to learning.
When we conduct online assessment of some routine tasks, then it is necessary to introduce additional measures to prevent overwriting (use of AI), and tasks are generated for each individual student from the task database.
The aim of this IO is to target HE teachers and to introduce learning material (chapter in project e-course) for teachers which will include assessment scenarios for the implementation of different assessment methods, mainly peer assessment and students' project assessment (that are related to both WBL and FCs) in different learning environments and within different HEIs. 
Further, within this output will be developed a tool (for an open source LMS) that supports peer assessment and project assessment to demonstrate and enable assessment as described in learning material.

The development of this IO will be organized around the following questions:

  • Q3: How to implement assessment methods in an online environment to be related to WBL and/or support FC to be relevant and reliable?
  • Q4: What are preconditions to successfully implement project based assessment and peer- /self- assessment in an online environment?

References:

  • Biggs, J. B., & Tang, C. (2007). Teaching for quality learning at university: What the student does. 3rd ed. Berkshire: Open University Press.
  • Divjak, B. (2015). Assessment of complex, non-structured mathematical problems. IMA International Conference on Barriers and Enablers to Learning Maths.
  • Marton, F., & Saljo, R. (1976). On qualitative differences in learning: I. Outcome and process. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 46(1), 4–11.
  • Entwistle, N. & Ramsden, P. (2015). Understanding Student Learning. Routledge Revivals. Routledge.