Ways of Designing Assessment with Feedback for Facilitating Students’ Self-Regulated Learning

Assessment occupies considerable resources, demanding complex technical, educational and ethical knowledge and capabilities, and considerable assessor self-awareness in monitoring their own decision making. Despite assessment’s importance and the extensive theorisation about its feasibility, validity, reliability and representativeness, its practice is mostly derived from traditional, commonly accepted practices, largely tacitly understood and rarely grounded in principles for high impact, assessment and feedback both of which have unique but powerful purposes. A critical high impact purpose is to provide students with information rich feedback on their learning. What is often overlooked is its timing in the overall program and what is often absent is an explicit expectation that students will take the feedback seriously and demonstrably use it to improve their learning. This active participation in the evaluation of what has been mastered and the scope of ‘how well’ it has been demonstrated is referred to as self-regulation of learning (SRL). All students regulate their learning to some extent, but some are far better than others. In fact, research has demonstrated that the greater the deliberateness of students in engaging in SRL, the more successful students are in the learning. Research has also demonstrated that when SRL is deliberately included in the instructional and assessment processes students are more active and successful agents of their own learning. In these times of rapid change, the capacity to initiate, adapt and self-regulate ones learning is an import capability, not only for students, but also for graduates entering the workplace for the first time.
The goal of this presentation is to identify what activities best contribute to students’ graduating with a detailed understanding of their own abilities and limitations and with a willingness to act as deliberate agents of their own learning development in their studies into their future careers.