Page 159 - Teaching Innovation for the 21st Century

Value of an online gallery
Boud and Falchikov (2006) argue that if we want our students to become effective lifelong learners, we must enable them to become assessors themselves. This encourages students to be participants in assessment practice instead of just being its objects. This does not necessarily mean that students take over the role of assessor but that they learn to analyse their own performance; identify gaps in their learning and plan for improvement; or to understand how to apply knowledge and skills learnt from one assessment in a different context. These are all valuable lifelong skills.
Assessment for lifelong learning rewards students’ ability to reflect on and critically evaluate their own learning, to assess the quality of their performance against agreed standards and to build the capacity to use these skills of judgement to influence their future learning and practice. An indispensable condition for improvement in student learning is that ‘the student comes to hold a concept of quality roughly similar to that held by the teacher’ (Sadler 1989: 121). Students need to possess the ‘meta’ skills needed for a lifetime of learning. Such ‘meta’ skills include:
These ‘meta’ skills were encouraged by enabling students to monitor their own (and peer) learning since they engaged with one another online and accessed peer submissions through the link repository on an online gallery on Blackboard. In this way, the assessment activities in this assignment explicitly endorsed critical reflection and self (and peer) critique; self (and peer) evaluation plays a key part in the development of the above-mentioned meta-skills.
Conclusion
As educators, a common challenge we face is to how to design assessment practices and processes that encourage students to develop a deeper approach to their learning. To achieve this, changes are required in both the educator and the student. As educators we can enable our students to develop lifelong learning skills through assessment; but students must also be contributing to their own learning if they are to become lifelong learners capable of judging their own actions. The point of this contribution was to showcase learning and assessment opportunities that assisted current and future leaders to build, articulate and document postgraduate attributes, enabling them as students to learn beyond their university experience, thus embracing and becoming effective lifelong learners.
Teaching Innovation for the 21st Century | Showcasing UJ Teaching and Learning 2021
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Meta-learning skills, or the ability to make informed judgments about their learning and performance levels and that of their peers.
Metacognitive skills, or self-awareness, self-regulation, and their application.
Meta-work skills or higher-order evaluation skills needed to identify and capitalise on learning opportunities throughout their careers.
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References
Barnett, R. 2000. Realizing the University in an Age of Super-complexity. SRHEA: Open University Press.
Boud, D. & Falchichov, N. 2006. ‘Aligning assessment with long-term learning’. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher
Education, 31(4): 399–413.
Jessop, T., El Hakim, Y. & Gibbs, G. 2014. ‘The whole is greater than the sum of its parts: a large-scale study of students’ learning in response to different programme assessment patterns’. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 39: 73–88.
Marwala, T. 2020. Closing the Gap: The Fourth Industrial Revolution in Africa. McMillan: South Africa.
Sadler, R. 1989. ‘Formative assessment in the design of instructional systems’. Instructional Science, 18: 119–144.