EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

This report seeks to expand the current understanding and ways of thinking about assessment, work and learning. Unlike current approaches to assessment that tend to separate learning and assessment, we suggest that good assessment should lead to greater professionalisation and understanding of work, enhance one’s capacity to learn beyond the immediate course/training, and enhance engaged learning. Hence, how assessment is integrated and intentionally designed into the curriculum and learning system requires an in-depth study and even review.

In this report, we examine assessment in relation to the changing nature of work and policy thrusts such as “SkillsFuture”, analyse six cases relating to different professions and learning contexts, highlight the challenges of leveraging assessment to enable learning and work, and suggest recommendations for assessment practice and policy making.

We adopt an interdisciplinary (sociocultural and pedagogical) approach, focusing on context, practice and design in carrying out the above. Through fieldwork, including interviews, focus group discussions, observations and document analysis, we study how assessment has been carried out (i.e. designed and implemented) in various learning sites including the classroom, laboratory, centralised training kitchen and training simulator.

Our findings show that factors such as the nature of work and the requirements of professional practice and/or vocation, as well as possibilities (for performance, responsiveness to change and adoption of assessment “best practices”), can constitute assessment, and not just assessment strategies and principles, in and/or of themselves. The findings also present a complex and dynamic picture of learning and assessment, including the mixing of summative-formative assessment, learning as becoming, and embodied learning. All these observations are factored into what we term “six dimensions of assessment” that identify key features and values of assessment as well as their relationships. These dimensions are: “alignment”, “authenticity”, “judgement”, “feedback”, “holism” and “future-orientedness” . The “six dimensions of assessment” challenge “traditional” perspectives of learning that include transfer of knowledge and assessment as merely the testing of knowledge, and they offer suggestions on how to think about and design assessment practices for work and learning.

The recommendations discussed in this report comprise “small-scale” suggestions on possible pedagogical interventions to specific challenges, e.g. the need for a shift in focus from what teachers do to what students learn, from what inputs are made into the education/learning process to what outcomes or effects come out of the process, and from what has been learned to what is needed to support or sustain continual learning. It is also “bigger picture” in highlighting the longer-term perspectival changes and broader structural challenges to be overcome.