On Friday 13 April, 2018, EDLAB organized an Assessment Seminar for teachers of Maastricht University. At the same time that the Tapijn area was under construction, teachers were having constructive discussions about assessment practices in the PBL context. About 60 teachers joined this special edition of the UM Teach-meet to deepen their knowledge about several assessment related topics.
The seminar kicks off with an insightful keynote speech by Professor of Education Cees van der Vleuten (FHML/SHE) about current assessment practices in a PBL. Van der Vleuten addresses a notable lack of alignment between learning objectives and the educational philosophy. He explains that in the current higher educational system, learning objectives are defined as competencies or 21st-century skills. However, practice shows that 21st-century skills such as team-functioning, communication, professionalism are sparsely assessed. In fact, the most dominantly used assessment method is summative end-of-block assessment. Van der Vleuten highlights the negative effects that this assessment method can have on student behavior: “We see a lot of poor learning styles, grade hunters, competitiveness between students, and grade inflation”. He also addresses the issue of reductionism which is a result of lacking feedback, poor alignment with curricular goals, missing longitudinal elements, and tick-box exercises amongst others. Another phenomenon that is also linked to summative assessment explained is the forget-curve: “If students pass their assessment, they are not inclined to learn from the provided feedback. As a result, they quickly forget a substantial part of the acquired knowledge.” Looking at these issues, we are left with one main question: How should we deal with individual assessment?
The assessment of competencies requires a real-life setting and involves a judgement of a professional. However, if it is true that performance is inconsistent across different contexts, how can one guarantee the validity and reliability of more subjective assessment methods? Van der Vleuten argues that objectivity is not equal to reliability. In fact, many subjective judgements are actually well reproducible and reliable. Good assessment practices require a mixture of both standardized and unstandardized assessment combined with the provision of proper longitudinal feedback. He illustrates this with example of the Physical-Clinical Investigator Master’s programme where teachers and students work with Programmatic Assessment.
