Artifact: Annotated Article
Date: November. 2007
Course: Practicum ADHE
Competency: Knowledge of learning approaches and principles, understanding and application of appropriate assessment strategies.
Stiggs’ central argument is the distinction between the assessment of learning and assessment for learning. The assessment of learning focuses on the measurement of learning rather than on learning itself. This measurement is summative and the focus is primarily on reliability.
Assessment for learning focuses on using assessment as a way to facilitate learning (Stiggs 2002). Assessment for learning tends to focus on the assessment process and the way that this process can be made more authentic and collaborative to engender learning. Stiggs points out that since the 1950s, the assessment of learning has become a dominant feature of education in North America. This trend includes the establishment of achievement tests in elementary schools, the No Child Left Behind policy in the United States and the institution of teaching standards in the United States and Canada. Stiggs proposes that this focus on evidence has to be subordinated to the learning purposes of education.
According to Stiggs, e-Portfolios are rich learning tools. They provide opportunities for deep reflection. e-Portfolios can be used to facilitate collaborative learning and to include multiple stakeholders in process of feedback. They also can become dynamic repositories to enable lifelong learning.
However, their use assessment tools can negatively effect these learning outcomes. In order to ensure reliability, e-Portfolios become structured and learners have little input on the way their artifacts are displayed and what artifacts they choose. This more ‘cookie cutter’ approach can reduce opportunities for learners to develop a sense of ownership (Wickersham L & Chambers 2007) and ‘construct’ their e-Portfolios.
In the process of planning workshops for the TEO at the University of British Columbia, I have come across the tension between learning and assessment time and again. Stiggs’ article sheds some important light on this issue and helped me to consider what the central purposes of the e-Portfolio program at the UBC TEO were—both implicit and explicit—in order to consider ways of harmonizing them in the future.
References
Stiggs, R. J. (2002) Assessment Crisis: The Absence of Assessment for Learning, Phi Delta Kappan, V.83, p. 758-765. Retrieved November 3, 2007 from www.pdkintl.org/kappan/k0206sti.htm
Wickersham L & Chamber S. (2007). The Electronic Portfolio Journey: a year later
Education, Vol 127, No. 3
