21-T8 Innovations in Assessment Research and Implications for Practice

Theme group: Assessment, evaluation and examination
Names course coordinators:
Renske Bouwer, renske.bouwer@vu.nl
Marije Lesterhuis, marije.lesterhuis@uantwerpen.be

Course description:
Assessment is essential for teaching and learning within schools or universities, as well as in the workplace. It is a broad construct, with different meanings and aims depending on its function. For instance, if assessment is used to make decisions on knowledge, understanding or skills, it is defined as assessment of learning (or: summative assessment). Assessment can also be used to inform teaching and/or to promote learning, which are respectively called assessment for and as learning (or: formative assessment). In the last decades, the last two assessment functions have received increased attention in both research and practice.

In this course, students will position their own research within this broad field of assessment and they will get to know the most relevant concepts, research questions, and practical issues within each assessment domain. In interactive guest lectures on various themes, well-established assessment researchers will promote participants’ theoretical understanding of assessment. They will present their recent research findings and they will interactively discuss how these findings have led to innovations in today’s research and educational practice.

There will also be an excursion to the University of Applied Sciences Utrecht (HU) in which participants discuss current assessment issues in higher education with educational practitioners. Together, they will also discuss to what extent scientific insights are already implemented in today’s assessment practice and how both researchers and teachers may foster this.

Course objectives:
After this course the PhD students:

• know each other and each other’s work in other to foster collaboration between theme members;
• are able to position their own research in the broad field of assessment research;
• can disentangle the different functions of assessment
• are able as a researcher to discuss and reflect on practical and theoretical issues related to formative and summative assessment
• are able to pose new and relevant research questions in the different domains presented by the guest lecturers

Course Programme

Meetings:
The course program consists of interactive meetings in which you will present your research, collaborate in subgroups on group assignments, follow interactive guest lectures and contribute to (sub)group discussions.

Day 1 – April 15, 2021

• 10.00 – 12.00 General framework by Marije Lesterhuis (University of Antwerp) & Renske Bouwer (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
• 12.00 – 13.00 Break
• 13.00 – 15.30 Pitch your own research
• 15.30 – 16.00 Recap and introduction of the final assignment

Day 2 – April 16, 2021

• 10.00 – 12.30 Guest lecture 2 by Liesbeth Baartman & Judith Gulikers
• 13.00 – 16.00 Group excursion to University of Applied Sciences Utrecht (HU)

In this group excursion you will get the opportunity to discuss with educational practitioners of the University of Applied Sciences Utrecht how they use assessment for summative and formative purposes in their classroom practice. How do they make decisions for assessments and assessment programs? What are constraints or struggles in designing and/or implementing assessments in practice? Do they use research findings for the optimization of their assessment program? Answers on these and other relating questions will provide a unique insight in what kind of research impacts educational practice, and, vice versa, what practice-based research questions are currently open for further research. To foster discussion, you will present your research in subgroups based on the posters that are designed at Day 1 and they will present some practical cases.

Day 3 – May 20, 2021

• 10.00 – 12.30 Guest lecture 3 by Dominique Sluijsmans, Zuyd Hogeschool – From pixels to portrait: Towards valid judgments about professional competence in higher education
• 13.30 – 16.00 Guest lecture 4 by Saskia Wools, Director CitoLab (reseach and innovation) -Technology Enhanced Assessment, developing innovations in assessment using design-based research methods

Day 4 – May 21, 2021

• 10.00 – 12.30 Guest lecture 5 by Jan Willem Strijbos – Feedback processing
• 13.30 – 16.00 Guest lecture 6 by Martijn Leenknecht, HZ University of Applied Sciences – Promoting students’ learning with (formative) assessment

Specification of the workload: (84 hours in total)

• f-2-f meetings: 30 hours
• preparation: 54 hours (preparation pitch, reading literature, posing questions, final assignment)

• Dates:
• Monday-Tuesday April 15-16: Studiecentrum OU Utrecht
• Monday May 20-21: VU Amsterdam

Location: Utrecht & Amsterdam