Thinking about assessment

Preamble

You have no doubt thought carefully about your unit content and have developed appropriate teaching strategies to help students learn. But how do you know whether they are learning what you want them to learn? And how do you know how effectively they are learning? The answer of course lies in assessment. Before undertaking the role of assessing students' work, it is useful to reflect on the nature of assessment, the issues associated with assessing, and the processes you adopt when providing feedback, grading and moderating.

The following activities are designed to help you:

• Activity 1: Nature of Assessment - Reflect on the nature of assessment
• Activity 2: Purposes of assessment - Understand the broad range of assessment purposes
• Activity 3: Principles of assessment - Understand the principles that underpin effective assessment practices
• Activity 4: Key assessment questions (69 KB)