5 Do I understand how assessment will help my learning?

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Five jigsaw puzzle pieces. Number 5 is on top.

Students tell us that they often bring with them a quite negative experience of assessment from their school days. They recall assessment being ‘done to them’ and often associate it with being punished if they did not do well. As a result it is not surprising if students struggle with the idea that assessment is a key element of effective learning.

When coming back to a period of study it is important to think about assessment in a different way. It is not simply an assessment of what you have learned but contributes significantly to you becoming an effective learner.

The key to effective learning from assessment tasks is your engagement with the feedback you receive. Think of assessment as a tool with which to improve your learning – the feedback you gain is a crucial element in your learning journey. By thinking of assessment as an embedded part of your learning rather than just a test tacked on at the end you are much more likely to become a successful distance learner.

Some assessment tasks in distance education will be a mixture of formal tasks (such as report writing, writing essays, presentations, scientific reports and calculations) and informal tasks (such as quizzes, blogging, contributing to wikis, forum posts or discussion threads).

Often courses have learning aims or outcomes (such as those from this course, which are listed below in Activity 6) and the assessment strategy of a course is designed to help you demonstrate what you have learned.

One way to engage with assessment more confidently is to develop self-assessment skills.