Assessment engineering: Aligning assessment, learning and instruction

Abstract

The most fundamental change in our views on assessment is represented by the notion of 'assessment as a tool for learning' (Dochy & Mc Dowell, 1997). Whereas in the past, we have seen assessment primarily as a means to determine measures and thus for certification, there is now evidence that the potential benefits of assessing are much wider and impinge on in all stages of the learning process. The new assessment culture (Birenbaum & Dochy, 1996) strongly emphasizes the integration of instruction and assessment. Students play far more active roles in the assessment of their achievement. The construction of tasks, the development of criteria for the assessment and the scoring of performance may be shared or negotiated among teachers and students.

In a first part, the presentation will outline these recent developments. In a second part, a concrete study will be presented. The purpose of this study was to get more insight in the effects of assessment-tasks integrated in a learning environment. Both the influence on students' performances and students' perceptions were investigated. The results indicate that making the assessment-tasks had positive influence on the students' overall performance. From the questionnaires and interviews, it appears that both the students and the teachers see the benefits of the assessment-tasks. It is concluded that small steps in the change of the assessment system can result in relatively big changes in students' learning and results.

It is obvious that the 'assessment' in its current meaning, referring to new modes of assessment, assessment for learning, assessment of competence, is still in an early phase of widespread use in educational practice (Segers, Dochy & Cascallar, 2003). The science of 'assessment engineering', trying to fill the gaps we find in aligning learning and assessment, asks for more research within many different fields.