Exams for the Purpose of Meaningful Learning: New Chances With Synchronous Self-Assessment

Introduction

This chapter muses around one basic trigger question: “How can exams contribute to meaningful learning?” This trigger question led us to reflect on different aspects of the phenomenon exam throughout the school history. The contents presented in this chapter ground on an eclectic, constructivist approach to teaching and learning. Both socio-cultural, as well as cognitivist theories contribute to the whole picture. The ideas were developed after over one decade of practical implementation at higher education teacher training courses and a research project at the University of Barcelona. We are optimistic that these reflections are likely suitable for earlier levels of compulsory education and thus the chapter will cater needs of a broad readership of educational practitioners and researchers.

The chapter is organized into four sections following these introductory paragraphs. In the first section, we will provide a succinct historical review of the roles of exams in educational systems in the world. Exams were originally invented as high-stakes assessment instruments which slowly entered the low-stakes classroom context. The second part of the chapter addresses the critical problem: the role of exams in assessing meaningful learning (ML), that is, the cognitive process of substantially connecting new information with particular bits of our mental scheme. In our line of argumentation, we suggest distinguishing between the result and the process of ML, that is, between the focus of assessment set on the final achievement (assessment of learning) or the chances for revising and constructing new knowledge (assessment for and as learning). Grounding on the prior sections, the third and fourth sections will offer new ideas and practical principles for designing better exams, based on the proposals of (A) the design of competence-based assessment tasks, and (B) a new assessment strategy, namely Synchronous Self-Assessment (SSA). This strategy aims at relocating the student into an empowered, personal agency position regarding exams, and is framed within a multi-phase model of classroom assessment. Following this proposal, the student is invited to take two kinds of decisions concerning the assessment occasion: decisions on which tasks to solve, and decisions concerning the relative evaluative weight of individual performance of the resolutions provided. We present some examples of assessment activities and students’ excerpts for illustration.