What make a good assessment principle? Not unsurprisingly, I’ve been looking at David Nicol’s answers to this question. Here’s my representation of his answer to the question which I have taken from a 2007 keynote talk he gave – I’m finding that writing it out like this is helping me to understand how to explain it:
Take a key idea from published research and use this to generate a set of principles:
- These principles should guide practitioners and be flexible,
- There should be minimal overlap between them,
- Each can be used alone,
- When combined they are more powerful,
- They help teachers to evaluate their practice.
In order for others to use them, you should develop/collate materials to go alongside them:
- Case studies,
- Explanations of why the key idea and principles were selected,
- Published literature.
So what should the key idea be? Well, that’s the question. David’s current thinking is that it is about the ability to make evaluative judgements, and he believes this underpins all graduate attributes. However, exactly how this is articulated might be dependent on subject area, we posit.
“Stars” flickr photo by lisbokt shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license
The transfer of knowledge is a key element of assessment for my students — how do they use what they know? Not just regurgitation?
Kevin
That’s really important – and getting them to do this also avoids the issues around plagiarism that bother some folk in HE.