Community Learning Development Resource 102 – 02
ASSESSING LEARNING AND LEARNING SUCCESS
SUMMARY
How can we best identify and confirm for learners, their learning success and progress, enabling them build their individual capacity as learners, their capacity for change, participation in community development, and their progress within education and training? What are the essential characteristics of learning assessment in community-based learning?
KEY IDEAS ABOUT THE ASSESSMENT OF LEARNING:
- Assessing learning is about finding out and measuring what learning has been successfully taken on board by a learner
- Assessment is an essential part of any learning process and an essential activity for both learners and workers
- We cannot do without assessment if we want to know if those we have drawn into learning opportunities are actually benefiting from their learning. We need to understand how assessment works, and how, why and when to use it
- Individual learners who are able to assess their own learning, better understand and value what they have learned and achieved, how they learned and what the benefits can be.
What might a learner gain from assessment at any point during their learning life:
- an understanding of what they have achieved?
- an understanding of the value of their learning gains?
- An understanding of how they have achieved success?
- the learning distance they have travelled – progress made?
- increasing self-confidence and self-worth as a learner from confirmed learning success?
- greater capacity as a learner to use their learning and skills?
- ideas for the use of their new learning?
- ideas for their choice of their next learning steps on their learning journey?
Key questions for workers as they seek to assess the learning of the learners they work with in the community:
- What evidence of learning do we want to assess?
- Is it the traditional subject-based learning – the knowledge, understanding and skills that have been gained by the learner?
- Is it how the learner has been changed by their learning experience and their successful learning?
- Is it how the learning gains are being used by the learner, and what the benefits and impact of those uses are – for the individual, for those around them, for the community?
- What evidences successful learning and progress?
- Evidence of what learners now know, understand or can do?
- Evidence that the learners are aware of their own learning gains and are choosing to take up new learning experiences and challenges?
- Evidence that the learners are benefiting from successfully using and applying their new learning within their own lives?
- How should we measure and judge the learning gains and progress?
- By developing and using criteria to formally test and examine for the learning?
- By developing criteria, by which the learners can measure and recognise their own learning gains?
- By developing criteria to measure the effects of their learning, the impact and benefits derived from their learning?
- How can we enable and support the learner to play an active part in the assessment process?
- By making assessment a shared, agreed and understood process with the learner as an equal partner?
- By putting the learner’s own perception of their learning gains at the heart of the process including the development of criteria?
PROMPTS FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION
- How important is it that we have assessment as a core process within any learning activity?
- How important is it that we try to develop ways of assessing that are effective and valid measures of the learning gains?
- Where should we seek the evidence of learning – within the learning experience, from the learner, from the world in which the learner lives and works?
- What evidence of learning do you think is required within your field of work?
- Why might formal education and training approaches to assessment, not work effectively within community-based learning?