Newsletter April 2025: Assessment of, for and as learning

The Purposes of Assessment in Higher Education 
Assessment in higher education serves several, concurrent, and competing purposes, such as assessment for: 

• Learning  
• Certification, progress and transfer
• Accountability to the public, government, funders 

While each of these purposes contribute to the quality of higher education, the resources available for assessment (e.g. educator time, student time, marking load, administrative burden etc.) are finite, so a balance between purposes must be struck. The overall utility of assessments has therefore been proposed to be a product of both their psychometric properties (validity and reliability), their educational impact (e.g. on learning), their feasibility/costs and their acceptability to stakeholders, such as students, teachers, and institutional leaderships. 

The Evolution of Assessment 
For many decades, there was much focus amongst scholars on Assessment of Learning and the assessment purposes of accountability and certification etc., and therefore on the end-of-course examinations and their psychometric qualities such as test validity and reliability. In more recent decades however, there has been a growing focus on assessment for the purpose of supporting in-course learning via the incorporation of feedback and feedforward opportunities for learners, sometimes also known as Assessment for Learning.

In addition, and subsumed within this realm, Assessment as learning has been suggested as an approach to develop autonomous learners. Students may – given adequate support and planning by their teachers - take an active part in setting their learning goals, monitoring their progress, assess their own work/learning (self-assessment), and reflect on their learning, which may help them to develop critical thinking and self-regulation skills.

Assessment as Learning thus seems well-aligned with the pedagogical principles of Student-centered Learning, which values students’ choice and voice. Self-assessment may not only be a way to train desirable academic skills; it may also be a feasible alternative to teacher feedback. However, completely un-scaffolded self-assessment is probably not a very good idea, as research has shown that the most incompetent tend to overrate themselves quite a lot, while the most competent tend to underrate themselves somewhat.

This cognitive bias (the Dunning-Kruger effect) has been observed across a broad array of competence domains, such as logical reasoning, grammar, social skills, business, politics, medicine, driving, aviation, spatial memory, literacy etc., and is thus likely to be generic in nature. In other words, the teacher’s expertise is crucial in the framing and training of students’ self-assessment activities, and students should not be left to paddle in their own canoes without being offered paddles or directions. 

Integrating Assessment Of and For Learning 

Luckily, both assessment of and for learning can be integrated at the course level (see for example Bjælde et al. (2017, 2023) referenced below for inspiration from a Danish context) or at the programmatic level (see van der Vleuten et al. (2012) referenced below). In other words, it is rarely a question of one approach or the other, but rather a question of optimal combinations of both approaches simultaneously, if assessments are to support the quality of courses and programs. 

From a student perspective, “assessment always defines the actual curriculum” (Ramsden, 2002, p. 187). Aligning or integrating the learning activities and the assessment of a course may thus support students’ perceived relevance of, motivation for, and participation in the learning activities of a course.