Assessing assignments

Reflective assignments can be assessed in different ways; below you will find information about summative, formative, peer, and self-assessment of assignments.

Term	How it is used in this section
Assessment	Refers to when one or more people judge how well a completed task meets specific criteria. This can include self-assessment, peer-assessment and assessment performed by staff. In ‘for completion’ assessment, the only criteria for assessment is whether or not the task has been completed; the quality of completion is not judged.
Assignment	Refers to any task completed outside of contact hours such as reflective projects, essays, or journals. These may or may not be assessed.
Activity	Refers to any task completed during contact hours such as reflective discussions, group work, journal writing, or presentations. These may or may not be assessed.

Criteria and rubrics can help you in your assessment

As highlighted on the ‘Should I assess?’ page, different levels of assessment will either require or benefit from explicit criteria and rubrics. They will help you in your assessment and will particularly support the reflectors when producing their reflections. Moreover if you decide to use peer or self-assessment, criteria and rubrics will be of great help as part of the guidelines students should be given for the assessment process.

Should I assess? (within the Facilitators’ Toolkit)

Assessment types that work well for reflective assignments

Reflective assignments lend themselves well to most types of assessment.

Classic summative assessment

In contrast to reflective activities, reflective assignments work particularly well for summative assessments that might carry high proportions of the overall course marks. This would be similar to a final essay in a course.

For example, this could be:

A reflective journal
A report that pulls on evidence from a reflective journal
A reflective blog
A reflective essay on the student’s development in the course
A reflective essay on meeting benchmark statements
A reflective essay on a particular experience (for example a critical incident in an experiential learning course)
A skills-development log

Peer-assessment can be used, but summative assessment might lend itself better to assessment from tutors or course organisers. While it is strictly possible, self-assessment might not suit summative work and it is recommended to use for formative work instead.

Summative assessment performed by:	Pros	Cons
Course organiser (tutors)	You ensure that every assignment is marked according to your standard (this is valuable given marks are attached) Easier to moderate and use with Exam Boards	Time consuming Often one perspective Students will not have the chance to develop and learn from assessing work
Peer-assessed	Gives students more responsibility Allows students to reflect on others’ work and get different examples of how the assignment could be done Can reduce staff time commitment while ensuring all students receive feedback Supports students’ assessment literacy Learning to fairly assess other people’s work is a valuable skill Gives the students practice for assessing their own work	Requires very clear guidelines for students that takes time to produce (however, when the guidelines have been created they can be reused next time) Can require additional moderation If reflections are personal, you might have confidentiality issues by showing them to others. Students need to be informed in advance if this will happen. Students may mark strategically given that it is summative and therefore a high-stakes assessment and purposely inflate or deflate certain marks. Not all students welcome peer assessment believing it lacks validity – the rationale and value needs to be clearly conveyed.

Summative assessments are high-stakes assessment. It is therefore important that students receive support on how to reflect and perform well. For instance, having a chance to practice in a low-stakes environment such as formative assessment can be valuable.

Formative assessment

Reflection is an excellent way of checking-in partway through an initiative and supporting students with their further development. Any kind of formative assessment is a valuable way of practising for a summative assignment and therefore smaller or interim versions of final assessments are great for formative feedback.

For example, this could be:

Individual entries from a reflective journal
A reflective blogpost
Interim essays on development during the course or on benchmark statements
Drafts on reflective summative assessments
Reflective workbooks

As mentioned, formative assessment is low-stakes and can be a good way of engaging either peers or students themselves in the assessment process.

Formative assessment performed by:	Pros	Cons
Course organiser (tutors)	You ensure that every assignment receives feedback according to your standards – this can be valuable as people are then ready for the final assessment	Time consuming Often one perspective Students will not get any of the pros for either peer or self-assessment
Peer-assessed	Gives students more responsibility Allows students to reflect on others’ work and get different examples of how the assignment could be done Can reduce staff time commitment An easy way of ensuring students get a lot of feedback during a course Opportunity to gain someone else’s view about how to do a an assignment Help to develop ability of assessing others’ and own work	Requires clear guidelines for students, which takes time to make (although these can be reused) You might want to moderate (takes time) If reflections are personal, you might have confidentiality issues by showing them to others. Students need to be informed in advance if this will happen
Self-assessed	Gives high levels of responsibility to students Is very reflective, and therefore supports the student’s learning Can reduce staff time commitment Develops the person’s ability to critically look at their own work	Lowered validity of the feedback students may give themselves Can require moderation to ensure that all students’ feedback to themselves is valid Requires detailed instructions and criteria/rubrics

For completion or pass/fail

Reflective assignments can easily be implemented ‘for completion’ or ‘pass/fail’. Including reflection ‘for completion’ will ensure that students start the process, but not necessarily engage with it fully. By creating a ‘pass/fail’ option you ensure that students will engage at least to the point of ‘good enough’ with the reflective process.

Types of reflective assignments that can work well ‘for completion’ or ‘pass/fail’:

Reflective journals/diaries
Reflective workbooks
Skills-development logs
Reflective videos/audio recordings

While ‘pass/fail’ of assessment is lower stakes than many other forms of summative assessments and ‘for completion’ is generally very low stakes, you still have the responsibility of ensuring that students have enough information on how to complete the assignment satisfactorily. For ‘pass/fail’, just like any other summative assessment, it means having both criteria and a rubric.

Conclusion

When assessing reflective assignments it is essential to have clear guidelines and criteria. The higher the stakes of the assessment (for example summative versus formative), the more important clear guidelines and rubrics become.

You can use both formative and summative assessment for reflective assignments. When posing a summative assessments it is important to allow students to practise or you must be extremely clear about what you want and provide detailed guidance.

Reflective assignments lend themselves better to summative assessment than activities do.

Where next?

To get a sense of typical assessment criteria to include when assessing reflection, head to the assessment criteria page. For sample rubrics, see the rubrics page.

Assessment criteria (within the Facilitators’ Toolkit)

Assessment rubrics (within the Facilitators’ Toolkit)

This article was published on 5 Nov, 2018