2.4 The making of assessment judgements

2.4 The making of assessment judgements

Given the expansion of capabilities being posited as important for the changing nature of work, assessment needs to do more work than previously. That is, it needs to move beyond technical and content knowledge to contextualisation and recontextualisation of knowledge (Evans, Guile, Harris & Allan, 2010), including “practical and critical understanding, moral and ethical dispositions, social and relational ability, performance that is flexible and creative to meet contextual needs” (Trede & Smith 2012, p. 189) and critical reflection (McEwen et al., 2010) or reflexivity. We need to move beyond testing and measurement to seeing all these aspects in relation to each other to form a judgement on practice (ibid). Additionally we cannot assume that good professional practice in one context is the same as in another context.

Just as judgements made in the process of work vary from individual to individual and from time to time, so too do assessment judgements. Boud and Soler (2016) suggest that the qualities of judgement that need to be developed are similar for students and for teachers; it is only the subsequent ends to which these judgements are put that differ. Key elements of developing informed judgement from the perspective of the students include:

 identifying oneself as an active learner;  identifying one’s own level of knowledge and the gaps in this;  practicing, testing and judging;  developing these skills over time;  embodying reflexivity and commitment.

Issues of reliability are readily addressed through processes and design strategies such as constructive alignment (Biggs, 2003), and collaborative interpretation of criteria against which judgements are made and moderated. Additionally judgements create new sets of relations in an environment (Hager, 2001), that is, judgement is pertinent not just to the individual, but the context in which they are made.

To explicate what we mean by judgement, we go back to Dewey. Dewey subsumed concepts and propositions into “a wider capacity called judgment which incorporates, the cognitive, the ethical, aesthetic, conative [the effort of the agent in a specific action] and other factors” (Hager, 2001, p. 355). Judgement is a “prime integrative capacity that underpins learning” (p. 358); that is, judgement is not peripheral to learning. In this sense we understand that it is important to develop learners’ capacity to make judgements, as in sustainable assessment (Boud, 2000; Boud & Soler, 2016). “The judgments we make as individuals about our own learning and on the learning tasks constitute assessment” (Edwards, 1997).

However this does not restrict the making of assessment judgements to formative and/or sustainable learning, where learning is the focus and purpose. In formative and sustainable assessment we assume knowledge is dynamic, not static, is contextual; we also assume that learning involves both individual cognition and social interaction through interaction with “tools” (e.g. ideas, concepts, physical tools such as computers, phones, a hammer, etc.) Making summative assessment judgements is also informed by how we think about knowledge and learning, and what we value and consider important (Knight, 2009). Such thinking will be evident in the design of the assessment task(s) and the criteria against which judgements are made. In discussing Dewey’s work in relation to judgement, Beckett (2012) made the following observations:

 Assessment needs to reflect the multifaceted and complex “realities” of learning, i.e. learning is no longer understood simply as mechanical processes of acquisition and transfer of knowledge and skills, but encompasses notions of embodiedness and situatedness as well as

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