Curriculum and assessment

Curriculum, Pedagogy, Assessment and Feedback.

Curriculum has been extensively defined in the literature (Glatthorn, Boschee & Whitehead, 2005) as a complex construct including content that is intended, explicit, designed, taught, written, assessed, but also includes elements that are hidden, tacit or unintended. To simplify matters, ‘curriculum’ can be thought of as being ‘what is taught’ in a broad sense.

Curriculum is differentiated from Pedagogy, with the latter being contested in the literature (Watkins & Mortimore, 1999; Young 2011) as being the art, science, theory, methods and profession of teaching with varying philosophical stances taken. In essence ‘pedagogy’ can be conceptualised as being ‘how we teach’.
In order to be most effective, teachers must have knowledge of both their topic manifest in the curriculum, the “what” and of pedagogy, the “how” (Barkley & Major, 2016). In PLACE, Pedagogy is addressed in the “Student learning and Support” domain.

Assessment is where curriculum and pedagogy meet for students. Doing assessment well is important because as Ramsden (1992) argues, assessment largely defines the curriculum from a student’s point of view and is the mechanism through which students progress at university. Delclos, Vye, Burns, Bransford and Hasselbring (1992) and Poehner (2007) define assessment as a process for evidencing, documenting, in measurable terms, the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and beliefs of the learner. Assessment can occur at any stage of a learning episode including before (for diagnostic purposes to inform future learning), during (as formative to assist current and future learning via feedback and feed-forward) and after (as summative to evaluate learning). As such assessment can be said to serve one or more purposes. In assessment for learning the aim is to assist students improve current and future learning, then assessment as learning aims to enhance the learner’s ability for self judgement, and the more familiar, assessment of learning is used to measure learning that has already occurred, often to assign grades (Yan and Boud, 2021).

Feedback and the related idea of feed-forward are key elements in effective assessment, but are the elements students tell us are the most lacking in higher education. At a minimum feedback apprises the learner of their current performance but more importantly, feed-forward is needed to provide guidance to improve future performance.

Sadler (1989) outlines three conditions for effective feedback: “the learner has to (a) possess a concept of the desired standard (or goal, or reference level), (b) compare the actual (or current) level of performance with the standard, and (c) engage in appropriate action which leads to some closure of the gap” (p. 121).

References

Sadler, D.R. (1989). Formative assessment and the design of instructional system, Instructional Science, 18.
Barkley, E.F. & C.H. Major (2016). Learning Assessment Techniques: a handbook for college faculty. Jossey Bass.
Delclos, V. R., Vye, N., Burns, M. S., Bransford, J. D. & Hasselbring, T. S. (1992). Improving the quality of instruction: Roles for dynamic assessment. In Haywood, H. C. & Tzuriel, D. (Eds.) Interactive assessment (pp. 317–331). New York, NY: Spinger-Verlag.
Glatthorn, A. A., Boschee, F., & Whitehead, B. M. (Eds.). (2005). Chapter1: The Nature of Curriculum. In Curriculum Leadership: Development and Implementation (pp. 2–35). SAGE Publications.
Poehner, M. E. (2007). Beyond the test: L2 Dynamic assessment and the transcendence of mediated learning. The Modern Language Journal, 91, 323–340.
Watkins, C. & Mortimore, P. (1999). Pedagogy: What do we know? In Mortimore, P. (Ed.), Understanding Pedagogy: And Its Impact on Learning. SAGE.
Yan, Z. & Boud, D (2021) Conceptualising assessment-as-learning, in Yan, Z. & Yang, L. Assessment as Learning: Maximising Opportunities for Student Learning and Achievement. Routledge.
Young, N. (2011). Pedagogy: A lexical oddity. Teach, 5(2), https://research.avondale.edu.au/teach/vol5/iss2/6/
Ramsden, P. (1992). Learning to teach in higher education. London: Routledge.