Flipped Exams as a Reliable and Formative Assessment Tool in Higher Education: Report of a COVID-19 Methodological Innovation

Introduction

A variety of techniques and strategies (projects, papers, portfolios, oral tests, presentations, questionnaires) are available to educators when preparing a continuous assessment system, which is adequate for both online and in person teaching. However, not all strategies are perceived equally (Gaytan & McEwen, 2007), and one of the main concerns in online teaching relates to the validity and reliability of assessment methodologies (Reedy et al. 2021).

This chapter discusses the adaptation of the assessment methodology in a university course due to the sudden forced transition of regular in-person sessions to online teaching during the COVID-19 outbreak. It is shown how the current lack of reliability in online assessment technologies is an opportunity to design new strategies that combine formative assessment and summative assessment (Sadler 1989, 1998; Dixson & Worrell 2016). This combination favours the students’ autonomy and their metacognitive learning, as well as their critical reflection, which leads to a formative evaluation process that sets the students’ self-learning process at the centre (Bordas & Cabrera 2001, Buscà et al. 2011, Gallardo Ramírez et al. 2021). This article further presents the results of a students’ perception survey on the implementation of flipped exams.

Specifically, this paper reports on the development, application and students' perception of a new assessment tool, here called flipped tests/exams, as a solution to overcome the limitations of online evaluation, such as validity and reliability. These are tests designed and answered by the students themselves at home, where they follow the teacher’s instructions, and are later corrected and assessed by the teacher, who can provide further feedback. This research argues that flipped exams, as defined below, facilitate assessment of both the learning process and the content and also stimulate students’ critical and reflective thinking skills. It is further shown that this tool differs from other so-called flipped exams that do not centre around the student in the way the present proposal does.

The implementation of the assessment via flipped exams takes place in the context of an introductory linguistics course from the Bachelor of English Studies at the Rovira i Virgili University (Catalonia, Spain) during the spring semester in 2020. The semester started in February 2020, and the university went into lockdown on March 13th, right before the day of the first evaluative test (1). While some activities could be easily adapted to an online setting, other tests and exams had to be redesigned in order to ensure the quality of the assessment, that is, the validity and reliability of the results. Online questionnaires were discarded due to the impossibility of obtaining a reliable result without strict supervision (Brimble 2015).

One of the possibilities we considered when adapting to emergency remote teaching was to design take home exams. According to Bengtsson (2019, p. 1), “take-home exams may be the preferred choice of assessment method on the higher taxonomy levels because they promote higher-order thinking skills and allow time for reflection. They are also more consonant with constructive alignment theories and turn the assessment into a learning activity.” However, the same author carries a systematic and exhaustive revision of this evaluative method and concludes that take home exams are not always recommended, since they have a high risk of plagiarism. Certainly, the difficulty of avoiding plagiarism and fraud in a numerous group of 67 students was extremely high.

In the target group, the teacher’s aim was to guarantee that the assessment required reflection and critical thinking through the tools and abilities acquired in the course, in order to evaluate both content and competences. It is well known that quality learning involves cognitive internalization from students (Area-Moreira 2020), more than a repetition of contents. The best way to achieve this goal was applying the learning by actively doing a task (Anzai & Simon 1979).