Sustainable assessment revisited

Abstract

Sustainable assessment has been proposed as an idea that focused on the contribution of assessment to learning beyond the time scale of a given course.It was identified as assessment that meets the needs of the present in terms of the demands of formative and summative assessment, but which also prepares students to meet their own future learning needs. This paper reviews the value of such a notion for assessment, how it has been taken up over the past fifteen years in higher education and why it might still be needed. It identifies how it has been a successful intervention in assessment discourse. It explores what more is needed to locate assessment as an intervention to focus on learning for the longer term. It shows how sustainable assessment can help bridge the gap between assessment and learning, link to ideas such as self-regulation, students' making judgements about their own work and course-wide assessment.

Developing evaluative judgement: enabling students to make decisions about the quality of work

“…Although they do not use the term, these sets of studies share a common purpose with evaluative judgement: to enhance students' critical capability via a range of learning and assessment practices. We propose that a focus on developing evaluative judgement goes a step beyond these through providing a more coherent framework to anchor these practices while adding a further perspective taken from sustainable assessment (Boud and Soler 2016): equipping students for future practice. However, what are the features of evaluative judgement and how does it integrate these multiple agendas?…”

“…The curriculum may then better serve the function of inducting and socialising learners into a discipline, providing them with opportunities to take part in discussing standards and criteria, and the processes of making judgements (of their own and others' work). This will help them develop appropriate evaluative judgement themselves in relation to criteria or standards and make more sense of and take greater control of their own learning (Boud and Soler 2016;Sadler 2010).…”

“…Each of these and other common scenarios require more than the ability to do good work; they require appraisal and an understanding of standards or quality. This capability of 'evaluative judgement', or being able to judge the quality of one's own and others' work, is necessary not just in a student's current course but for learning throughout life (Boud and Soler 2016). It encapsulates the ongoing interactions between the individual, their fellow students or practitioners, and standards of performance required for effective and reflexive practice.…”

Assessment rubrics: towards clearer and more replicable design, research and practice

“…Students can also be involved in the creation of rubrics and identification of criteria (Andrade & Du, 2005;Boud & Soler, 2015). As the teacher in charge of the course unit, I created the sample rubric.…”

Evidence of Sustainable Learning from the Mastery Rubric for Ethical Reasoning

“…Interest in sustainable learning has been building in educational communities outside the United States (e.g., [2][3][4][5]), although some of the conversation focuses on the role of assessment in the sustainability of learning [2,3,6]; see also [7]. Within the United States (although not exclusively), sustainable learning has been studied as "transfer", the application of learned skills or knowledge from the learned-in context to other contexts (excellently reviewed by Barnett and Ceci [8] and extensively discussed by Ambrose et al [9]; particularly in Chapter 4).…”