Edited by Steve Bamlett, Tuesday, 11 Aug 2015, 09:21
I found the transcript (and the short clip) of Boud's lecture really fascinating.
The stress on fostering 'reflexivity and self-regulation' (p. 22 of transcript) in learners about the nature and functions of assessment seems central, as is the central idea of the primacy of 'judgement' over 'assessment'. Judgement is seen as a collective and collaborative activity, as it inevitably is in any 'practice' situation, outside of the judicial system - where final decisions are a matter of both convenience and necessity rather than truth.
The stress on collaborative nature of judgement is less important than the implications of co-construction of the assessment domain, the assessment task and judgements about what constitutes competence in performing the task in that domain. Boud uses Seely Brown's word 'genuine' (p. 23) to express the nature of such judgement - in that this is how professionals make judgements in situations where inter-disciplinarity and inter-professionalism are necessities (of course as a social worker at heart I'd instance safeguarding or support provision).
I loved the richness of the implication that collaborative and co-constructional work means more than involving people in 'self-assessment', even though that too is necessary (p. 20). The section on 'disaggregating' the surrogate role of sole assessor held by university lecturers is fascinating:
"we need to think about what are the appropriate communities of judgement that students need to engage with, to be, to think about, to take account of, and position themselves with respect to. ... What is the appropriate community of judgement for any kind of activity?" (p. 21).
And how great to be able at last to query the satisfactoriness of psychometric measures and the authoritative hold they have on the area - now seen (p. 21) as a 'mere frippery.'
The way I understand this is that self-assessment cannot be enough because it assumes that the 'self' that started the journey constituted by any challenging activity is the same 'self' as that which emerges. But, of course it isn't - even if only in that defines its boundaries in relation to the rest of the community in different ways - ones impacted upon by the collaboration in the task and co-construction of outcomes that it involved. This is a matter not only of personal identity but how we should think about personal identity - perhaps in a more open and less bounded way. And one way the self changes is in learning more appropriate ways of assessing (judging) its own judgements.
If learning has been active, the self-judgements people make of self and its relation to collaborators and the outcomes learned will always be rather different from learning outcomes set beforehand. This also means that assessment criteria will have developed - will involve more and more personnel than you might be aware of when you start.
QAA Standardisation - it's going nowhere compared to this. Its function might seem to be just a matter of convenience - creating more barriers between them (who we want to yearn to know what we know) and us (who think we already know it).
Boud.
I found the transcript (and the short clip) of Boud's lecture really fascinating.
The stress on fostering 'reflexivity and self-regulation' (p. 22 of transcript) in learners about the nature and functions of assessment seems central, as is the central idea of the primacy of 'judgement' over 'assessment'. Judgement is seen as a collective and collaborative activity, as it inevitably is in any 'practice' situation, outside of the judicial system - where final decisions are a matter of both convenience and necessity rather than truth.
The stress on collaborative nature of judgement is less important than the implications of co-construction of the assessment domain, the assessment task and judgements about what constitutes competence in performing the task in that domain. Boud uses Seely Brown's word 'genuine' (p. 23) to express the nature of such judgement - in that this is how professionals make judgements in situations where inter-disciplinarity and inter-professionalism are necessities (of course as a social worker at heart I'd instance safeguarding or support provision).
I loved the richness of the implication that collaborative and co-constructional work means more than involving people in 'self-assessment', even though that too is necessary (p. 20). The section on 'disaggregating' the surrogate role of sole assessor held by university lecturers is fascinating:
"we need to think about what are the appropriate communities of judgement that students need to engage with, to be, to think about, to take account of, and position themselves with respect to. ... What is the appropriate community of judgement for any kind of activity?" (p. 21).
And how great to be able at last to query the satisfactoriness of psychometric measures and the authoritative hold they have on the area - now seen (p. 21) as a 'mere frippery.'
The way I understand this is that self-assessment cannot be enough because it assumes that the 'self' that started the journey constituted by any challenging activity is the same 'self' as that which emerges. But, of course it isn't - even if only in that defines its boundaries in relation to the rest of the community in different ways - ones impacted upon by the collaboration in the task and co-construction of outcomes that it involved. This is a matter not only of personal identity but how we should think about personal identity - perhaps in a more open and less bounded way. And one way the self changes is in learning more appropriate ways of assessing (judging) its own judgements.
If learning has been active, the self-judgements people make of self and its relation to collaborators and the outcomes learned will always be rather different from learning outcomes set beforehand. This also means that assessment criteria will have developed - will involve more and more personnel than you might be aware of when you start.
QAA Standardisation - it's going nowhere compared to this. Its function might seem to be just a matter of convenience - creating more barriers between them (who we want to yearn to know what we know) and us (who think we already know it).
Steve