Assessment and feedback

Assessment and feedback are important to promote learning and should give students an overview of where they are in their learning process, where they are going and what they should do to progress.

All forms of individual production are basically suitable for assessment, and much can be submitted electronically: project reports, essays, discussions, videos and, in practice, all types of texts, including multimodal ones. Through the use of video, students also provide documentation of artistic and practical processes and products or reflection on their own learning. Group work may also be subject to assessment.

Feedback may be given both orally and in writing.

• Oral feedback can be given directly when the student, for example, gives a presentation or submits a physical product or work.
• Written feedback is often provided through annotation and comments in a document.
• Many learning platforms can include the possibility of oral feedback in an audio or video file. Many students find this more personal than written feedback. Many tutors also find that oral feedback is labour-saving.

Portfolio assessment

A portfolio assessment is an ongoing body of work on the production, assessment and improvement of, for example, texts, videos or other products.

Dette er en pedagogisk metode som kombinerer både underveis- og This is a method that combines both formative and final assessment. The educational arguments for portfolio assessment are that the method increases in-depth learning through greater interaction between students and tutor over time, often over the course of a whole semester. The method combines the teaching method and form of assessment, which in turn means that portfolio assessment impacts teaching practice. Virtually all forms of assessment and types of work can be included in a portfolio assessment. A main point is that the students receive and give feedback on their work during the process and can improve it, while the portfolio as a whole can be assessed. Students can receive feedback along the way, either from tutors or fellow students, or give themselves feedback in the form of e.g. a reflection paper. (36)

Online tests and quizzes – asynchronous and flexible

The learning platforms usually have functions for creating self-correcting tests. There are also many browser and app-based tools. Some reasons to create self-correcting tests online follow below:

• The students can receive immediate feedback.
• There are many adaptation possibilities (time, place, scope, degree of formalisation).
• It frees up the tutor’s time.
• Tests can be used as a learning resource.
• Tests can be used as small breaks to summarise or reflect in lecture-based teaching.
• Tests can be created to activate the students’ understanding.
• Tests can be repeated as many times as the student wishes.

Peer assessment

Peer assessment is also called peer review. In Part 1, we wrote a little about peer assessment and feedback literacy. Peer assessment enables students to develop feedback literacy.

It is important to talk to the students about why peer assessments are useful. A good class environment can help ensure that as many people as possible feel a mutual obligation to invest effort in the feedback. Time is scarce for most people taking flexible programmes and courses. They must feel that the exercises are useful. They must do enough assessments to make them competent in the exercise, but not so many that they get bored of it.

Self-assessment

Facilitation to ensure that students take part in the assessment of their own work and reflect on their own learning is a requirement at e.g. upper secondary school level (38) and a good educational principle in all learning situations.

Self-assessment should not only have a retrospective element: What have I learnt? What did I do to get to where I am now?, but also forward-looking: What do I need to achieve the learning objective? What do I need to do specifically?

Both a learning log and reflection papers are examples of individual self-assessment. Discussions between students or with tutors about their own learning may also be useful in self-assessment work.

At the time of writing (autumn 2023), there is a lot of talk about how artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced language models (such as ChatGPT) will impact exam assignments and actual exams. At the same time, tutors are exploring how the new technology can be used as a learning partner and assessment assistant.

One of the challenges associated with asynchronous assessment activities is knowing that it is the students who have completed the assessment activity themselves and that they have only used the permitted aids.

Although the pace of development is rapid, experience of flexible forms of assessment from the technological developments of recent years may be useful.

Translated by EPALE Norge and HK-dir