Dr Adele Flood kindly agreed to do a last minute seminar for us today. Dr Flood is from the University of New South Wales Learning & Teaching Unit. She is currently managing the University wide Assessment Project. Her current research takes two directions: in the first she is investigating ways of re-framing teaching practice to focus on student action in learning. The second is in response to an ongoing interest in Identity and creativity from the perspectives of both an educator and a practitioner.
Her presentation today focussed on how to create student centred assessment tasks that help position assessment as learning for students. She posed a series of questions that academics should ask themselves when developing assessment tasks for student learning. We explored two models of learning and Dr Flood showed how, by reframing the questions we ask, we can create assessment tasks that focus on student-action centred learning.
This is just good, sound assessment practice and applicable whether we’re discussing assessment via traditional media or in an electronic environment, so we see clear congruence and applicability of the strategies she highlighted with those we are already seeking to develop and evaluate in this project.
A big thank you to Dr Flood for her input today and we wish you a happy sojourn in the UK and a safe journey home : )
You can find Dr Flood’s full research profile here.
I was so pleased to hear her discuss Teaching AS Learning. I’ve long advocated that this is a useful distinction from Teaching FOR Learning and had a bit of a ‘full and frank’ discussion with Chris Rust about it at ISSOTL when it was in Liverpool. He argued that there was no distinction between the terms but I’m adamant that they are substantively different. I like Adele’s student-action centred learning as a distinction from ordinary or garden-variety student-centred learning and this is something that has really got me thinking. It links into the research I’ve published on student assessment choice and self-regulated learning. I need to do some more thinking on this over the weekend and maybe a post will come from it…
I think there’s a material difference.
‘For’ means that the assessment is meant to promote learning, denoting that learning is something beyond the assessment, towards which it aims.
‘As’ means that the assessment IS the learning – that’s where the learning resides and it’s not something beyond or outside the process.
I’ve never thought of this distinction before but I think it’s an insightful and exciting notion. I’m now wondering how I can apply it in my next assessed task…