Programmatic assessment: not just grades but substantive feedback
Students do not learn optimally when they only receive grades. They learn even less when this is a bad grade. In fact, teachers should provide their students with substantive, constructive feedback before grading them. If the teacher offers this several times, over a longer period of time, it provides students with the space to fail and learn from their mistakes. ScienceGuide spoke to some UU colleagues about this, (in Dutch).
Programmatic assessment can be a suitable model for this alternative form of assessment. This model looks at the entire development of the student, and assumes that the complex skills that students need to learn cannot be captured in one test. There are more moments of assessment, all of which are part of the learning process. Programmatic assessment is currently being used within several programmes at UU.
The Centre for Academic Teaching has a Special Interest Group (SIG) that focuses entirely on Programmatic Assessment. During the meetings of this SIG, teachers can talk to each other about this topic to share experiences and learn from each other. It has been a bit quiet lately in the SIG, but behind the scenes there have been many developments and the community around programmatic assessment is active again!
Are you interested in programmatic assessment and do you want to investigate whether you could apply this yourself? Read more about the SIG here and sign up! All teachers are welcome. We will keep you informed of planned meetings by email.