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Using assessment to support student
learning
at
By Graham Gibbs
The original author of this document is Professor Graham Gibbs.
The University of East Anglia has purchased from Leeds Metropolitan
University the licence to adapt the document, incorporating the UEA logo as
required, and to place the adapted version in electronic form on the UEA’s
intranet.
© Leeds Metropolitan University 2010
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Using assessment to support student
learning
Contents
1. Introduction
2. How assessment influences student learning
3. Pedagogic principles underlying the use of assessment to support learning
4. Assessment tactics that support student learning
5. Case studies of the use of assessment to support student learning within
Leeds Metropolitan University
6. Evaluating the impact of assessment on student learning
7. Case studies from UEA relating to effective student feedback
References
Acknowledgements
Section 2 of this publication draws on Gibbs and Simpson (2004). The kind
permission of the Journal
Learning and Teaching in Higher Education
and of
its Editor, Dr Phil Gravestock, are gratefully acknowledged.
© Leeds Metropolitan University 2010
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1. Introduction
Assessment makes more difference to the way that students spend their time,
focus their effort, and perform, than any other aspect of the courses they
study, including the teaching. If teachers want to make their course work
better, then there is more leverage through changing aspects of the
assessment than anywhere else, and it is often easier and cheaper to change
assessment than to change anything else.
This manual is designed to support Scheme, Course, Award and Programme
level leaders to introduce changes to assessment with the aim of improving
student learning. It is not meant to be a list of ‘tips’, although there are plenty
of practical ideas here in Section 3, and case studies from within Leeds
Metropolitan University in Section 4. Rather it is intended to provide a way of
thinking about how assessment works, and how students respond to it, so that
teachers can make sense of what is currently happening on their own
courses, and make their own context-relevant decisions about what they
might do to improve things. It reviews the available empirical evidence in
some detail, so that, as far as possible, these decisions can be made with
confidence that they will produce improvements in student performance. It
also provides three evaluation tools to help diagnose potential problems and
measure any improvements brought about by changes teachers might make.
Good luck!
Graham Gibbs
Honorary Professor, University of Winchester
© Leeds Metropolitan University 2010
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2. How assessment influences student
learning
In the early 1970s, researchers on both sides of the Atlantic (Snyder, 1971;
Miller & Parlett, 1974) were engaged in studies of student learning at two
universities. What they found was that, unexpectedly, what influenced
students most was not the teaching but the assessment. Students described
all aspects of their study – what they attended to, how much work they did and
how they went about their studying – as being completely dominated by the
way they perceived the demands of the assessment system. Derek Rowntree
stated that “if we wish to discover the truth about an educational system, we
must first look to its assessment procedures” (Rowntree, 1987, p.1). The
Snyder and Miller & Parlett studies went further and highlighted the way
students respond to these assessment procedures. More recently, qualitative
studies have emphasised the importance of understanding the way students
respond to innovations in assessment (Sambell & McDowell, 1998).
Snyder’s work gave birth to the notion of the ‘hidden curriculum’: different from
the formal curriculum written down in course documentation, but the one
students had to discover and pay attention to if they wanted to succeed:
“From the beginning I found the whole thing to be a kind of exercise in
time budgeting … . You had to filter out what was really important in
each course … you couldn’t physically do it all. I found out that if you
did a good job of filtering out what was important you could do well
enough to do well in every course.”
(Snyder, 1971, pp. 62-63)
Once students had worked out what this hidden curriculum consisted of, they
could allocate their effort with great efficiency:
“I just don’t bother doing the homework now. I approach the courses so
I can get an ‘A’ in the easiest manner, and it’s amazing how little work
you have to do if you really don’t like the course.”
(Snyder, ibid, p. 50)
Miller & Parlett focused on the extent to which students were oriented to cues
about what was rewarded in the assessment system. They described different
kinds of students: the ‘cue seekers’, who went out of their way to get out of the
lecturer what was going to come up in the exam and what their personal
preferences were; the ‘cue conscious’, who heard and paid attention to tips
given out by their lecturers about what was important; and the ‘cue deaf’, for
whom any such guidance passed straight over their heads. This ‘cue seeking’
student describes exam question spotting:
© Leeds Metropolitan University 2010
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“I am positive there is an examination game. You don’t learn certain
facts, for instance, you don’t take the whole course, you go and look at
the examination papers and you say ‘looks as though there have been
four questions on a certain theme this year, last year the professor said
that the examination would be much the same as before’, so you
excise a good bit of the course immediately …”
(Miller & Parlett, 1974, p. 60)
In contrast, these students were described as ‘cue deaf’:
“I don’t choose questions for revision – I don’t feel confident if I only
restrict myself to certain topics.”
“I will try to revise everything …”
(Miller & Parlett, 1974, p. 63)
Miller & Parlett were able to predict with great accuracy which students would
get good degree results:
“… people who were cue conscious tended to get upper seconds and
those who were cue deaf got lower seconds.”
(Miller & Parlett, 1974, p. 55)
Many students are perfectly capable of distinguishing between what
assessment requires them to pay attention to and what results in worthwhile
learning, as this postgraduate Oceanography student explained:
“If you are under a lot of pressure then you will just concentrate on
passing the course. I know that from bitter experience. One subject I
wasn’t very good at I tried to understand the subject and I failed the
exam. When I re-took the exam I just concentrated on passing the
exam. I got 96% and the guy couldn’t understand why I failed the first
time. I told him this time I just concentrated on passing the exam rather
than understanding the subject. I still don’t understand the subject so it
defeated the object, in a way.”
(Gibbs, 1992, p. 101)
Whether or not what assessment is trying to assess is clearly specified in
documentation, students work out for themselves what counts, or at least
what they think counts, and orient their effort accordingly. They are strategic in
their use of time and ‘selectively negligent’ in avoiding content that they
believe is not likely to be assessed. It has been claimed that students have
become more strategic with their use of time and energies since the studies
conducted in 1970s and that students today are even more strongly
influenced by the perceived demands of the assessment system in the way
they negotiate their way through their studies (MacFarlane, 1992).
© Leeds Metropolitan University 2010
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