British academic and author Phil Race in his excellent and straightforward guide for teaching in higher education called Making Learning Happen, declared that assessment is the most powerful lever we have to influence student behaviour. Former University of Sydney Pro-Vice Chancellor, Paul Ramsden (2003), noted that assessment is the actual curriculum. It determines what is learned, what is taught and how students engage. British Academic, George A. Brown, advised “if you want to change student learning, then change the methods of assessment” (1997, p. 7). It would be fair to say that assessment is a critically important aspect of learning at tertiary level. Assessment design should be front and centre of our thinking in our efforts to lift the quality of learning. If an assessment task scaffolds the timely completion of activities to achieve a learning goal, helps students with time management and reflection on their progress, then that assessment has the potential to develop important life-long learning skills.
A multi-part assessment design pattern
The Sustained Course Participation Assessment (SCPA) design pattern, recently published by Dr Alison Casey does just this. The SCPA pattern involves a multi-part assessment activity worth 20% of student’s overall marks. It provides a clear extrinsic motivator to engage with the task. This pattern involves determining the behaviours and activities students should be engaging in in the course, and identifying artefacts as evidence of students’ completion of those activities in a timely manner. The pattern leverages student’s extrinsic motivation, but also supports students’ ability to monitor and control their behaviours – a key capability to successful learning, known in the literature as self-regulated learning. In the example evaluated as part of the identification of the pattern, two components of the assessment were weekly reflection entries – one on engagement with course materials and the other a reflection on workshop activities. The reflections were to serve as raw material for a final reflective assessment piece. A third component was regular contributions to a discussion board, designed to promote peer to peer connection across the cohort.
Self-regulated learning
Self-regulated learning (SRL) is a Social Cognitive perspective (Bandura, 1989) that has been used extensively in educational research to understand how internal and external factors influence learning. SRL can be defined as “self-generated thoughts, feelings and actions that are planned and cyclically adapted to the attainment of personal goals” (Zimmerman, 2000). The self-regulatory capability is of incredible importance to us as humans. Strong self-regulators lead fulfilling and successful lives, whilst weak ones lead diminished ones. SRL has been studied extensively for decades and the link between SRL and academic achievement is well established. What is of particular interest to us, as researchers and designers of learning, is that the SRL capability is not fixed, like eye colour or height; it is something that can be learned and taught and even influenced through external factors (Pintrich, 1995) – like the design of assessment tasks.
Promoting SRL through assessment
Which brings us back to the SCPA assessment design pattern. The original pattern was successfully deployed in a large class with 595 students. Normally a multi-part assessment would be too onerous to mark in a large cohort. But with the SCPA pattern, the content of the artefact is not marked, only evidence of whether a student completed the activity in a timely manner. There is potential for this form of assessment to be entirely automated. Time management for study is an important aspect of SRL and learning. Some students are poor at regulating their time for study. They leave things to the last minute by cramming just before an exam or putting in an all-nighter just before a deadline. This approach to study and learning leads to poor learning. An assessment task that helps them practise self-regulatory habits is therefore of significant interest to teachers and designers of learning who want to promote SRL in their students.
Findings and future research
One might think that in a assessment task where marks are awarded on simple completion might lead to students gaming the system – doing the minimum to trigger the mark. Analysis of the submitted texts showed that this was almost never the case. Student focus groups revealed that students understood the utility of the weekly reflection posts. You can read more detail of the findings here. An aspect of the pattern that did not work so well was contribution to a discussion board. Focus group interviews revealed students saw this as busy work. They did not think regular posting would contribute to peer to peer connection, and so were not motivated to engage. This finding highlights the importance of authenticity in assessment design (Villarroel et al., 2018). We need to design assessment that do not feel like “chores” (Lodge, Howard, & Broadbent, 2023) if we want students to engage in a meaningful way.
The innovative SCPA pattern is an example of how to shift assessment focus from the artefact to the processes of learning. The SCPA pattern aligns to the first proposition in Assessment 2020: Seven propositions for assessment reform in higher education (Boud & Associates, 2010), which is the basis for TEQSA’s guidelines on how to respond to the challenge of assessment in the AI Age (Lodge, Howard, Bearman, et al., 2023). Proposition 1 involves students engaging in appropriate tasks, through a substantial involvement over time, with components that are logically sequenced and organised and in a coherent sequence. The SCPA pattern does this, but is designed in a way to scaffold self-regulatory behaviours through the timely completion of appropriate tasks. It would be interesting to investigate the SCPA pattern further by applying the pattern to different learning contexts, within Business Education and outside it. Futher research might measure students’ SRL capability before and after engaging with the SCPA pattern. This would provide quantitative evidence on the role of the pattern in helping students beccome better self-regulated learners, a key to future learning success.
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About the author
Educational Developer, Business Co-Design