Centre for Health Education Scholarship, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
Med Educ. 2020 Jan;54(1):54-59. doi: 10.1111/medu.13935. Epub 2019 Aug 26.
Is the statement 'assessment drives learning' a myth?
Instructors create assessments and students respond to these assessments. Although such responses are often labelled indications of learning, the responses educators observe can also be considered a performance. When responses are aligned with generating stable changes, then assessment drives learning. When responses are not aligned with stable changes, we must consider them to be something else: a performance put on partially or fully for the sake of implying capability rather than actual learning. The alignment between the assessments educators create and the way students respond to these assessments is determined by the actions students take in our curriculum, in preparation for our assessments and after engaging with our assessments.
Not all assessments need to or should support learning, but when we assume all assessments 'drive learning', we endorse the myth that assessment is necessarily a formative aspect of our curricula. When we create assessments that encourage performance activities such as cramming, competing for tutorial airtime and impression management in the clinical setting we drive students to a performance. By thinking about how our students, institutions, curricula and assessments support learning and how well they support performance, we can modify and more fully align our curricular and assessment efforts to support learners in achieving their (and our) desired outcome. So, is the phrase 'assessment drives learning' a myth? This paper will conclude that it often is but we as educators must, through our leadership, move this myth towards a reality.
“评估推动学习”是一个谬论吗？
教师创建评估，学生对这些评估做出回应。尽管这些回应通常被标记为学习的迹象，但教育者观察到的回应也可以被视为一种表现。当回应与产生稳定变化一致时，评估就推动了学习。当回应与稳定的变化不一致时，我们必须将其视为其他东西：为了暗示能力而不是实际学习而部分或完全表现出来的表演。教师创建的评估与学生对这些评估的回应之间的一致性取决于学生在我们的课程中采取的行动，为我们的评估做准备以及参与我们的评估后采取的行动。
并非所有评估都需要或应该支持学习，但当我们假设所有评估“推动学习”时，我们就认可了评估必然是我们课程形成性方面的这一谬论。当我们创建鼓励表演活动的评估时，例如在临床环境中死记硬背、争夺辅导时间和印象管理，我们就促使学生表现出来。通过思考我们的学生、机构、课程和评估如何支持学习以及它们在多大程度上支持表现，我们可以修改并更充分地调整我们的课程和评估工作，以支持学习者实现他们（和我们）期望的结果。那么，“评估推动学习”这个短语是一个谬论吗？本文将得出结论，它往往是，但我们作为教育者必须通过我们的领导力，将这个谬论转变为现实。
