Assessing Performance

It has been our experience that the better we are able to assess learners’ performance, the richer can be our approaches to developing it. This chapter explores this tight interrelationship of teaching, learning and assessment. We begin by exploring the purposes of assessment, and what happens when there is confusion or disagreement about those purposes. We reassert the centrality of performance assessment, designed to provide insights into the capability of learners. This capability however is not a single monolithic quality, but can be flavoured to emphasise particular perspectives on capability. We discuss frameworks for creating authentic assessment tasks and techniques we have used for presenting these to learners in convincing ways. We explore the substructuring of activities and the critical role that this plays in revealing evidence of learners’ capability.

Keywords

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