► Students’ learning processes in terms of integration between knowledge, skills and attitudes are a closed book. ► Integration processes are conceptualised in analogy to transfer processes. ► Three ...kinds of integration processes can be distinguished: low-road, high-road en transformative integration.
Current research focuses on competence development and complex professional tasks. However,
learning processes towards the integration of knowledge, skills and attitudes largely remain a black box. This article conceptualises three integration processes, in analogy to theories on transfer. Knowledge, skills and attitudes are defined, reconciling different research perspectives. Low-road integration is hypothesised to occur through practice towards automatisation. High-road integration requires reflection on the task besides practice. Transformative integration requires critical (self)reflection and openness to change. A model of different professional tasks is presented, offering hypotheses regarding different integration processes, which provides a basis for further empirical research.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK
We argue that assessment and feedback practices in higher education need to be transformed to better address three purposes: promoting learning, assuring assessment rigour, and communicating ...students' employability. To address shortcomings in the current assessment and feedback culture, we propose programmatic assessment (PA), a new approach to assessment developed initially in medical education and now applied to a range of other professional fields. We outline eight recommendations that synthesise the key principles underpinning PA. Then, drawing on experience with PA in various professional fields in the Netherlands, we describe and illustrate four action steps for programme teams to take to implement programmatic assessment. We highlight implications of such a shift for leaders and professional services staff before concluding that PA can transform higher education by creating a more productive culture of assessment and feedback.
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BFBNIB, NUK, PILJ, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
One aim of vocational education is educating students for occupations by fostering the development of students’ capacities to become successful practitioners. During their education students are ...usually afforded work experience. When this is the case, students learn both at school and at the workplace. Learning at the workplace requires assessment, but this differs from assessment at school because of where (at the workplace), how (through participation) and what students learn (a process of belonging, becoming and being). At the workplace, students are usually assigned an educator who takes on the dual role of educator and assessor. This review takes a sociocultural perspective on learning at the workplace and from this perspective brings together what is already known about how workplace educators assess student performance through a qualitative systematic review. Our analysis aimed for narrative synthesis using iterative thematic analysis. The results depict workplace assessment as manifested in day-to-day work and shaped by relationships. Workplace educators are engaged in a continuous process of assessment-related interactions. They prefer using criteria that are embedded in the norms and values of their vocational community, rather than criteria prescribed by school. Workplace assessment requires negotiated criteria and truly collaborative assessment practices. These practices can be purposefully co-designed and require close communication between school and work. This review shows that assessment of workplace performance in vocational education can be conceptualised as a practice that is shaped by the specific workplace in which it is embedded. From this perspective assessment can be explicated and acknowledged, and as a consequence be further conceptualised and researched in both assessment research and vocational education research.
Students' vocational knowledge can be defined as all knowledge students require performing within occupational practice. In the context of vocational education and training, students' vocational ...knowledge is often discussed from a perspective of either what should be taught and learned in schools or different kinds of knowledge students should gain in occupational practice. Much less focus is on students' vocational knowledge itself. This exploratory in-depth study aims to describe what characterises students' vocational knowledge. To explore students' vocational knowledge, an analytic framework is used to describe vocational knowledge characteristics specifying: (1) occupation-specific knowledge components, and (2) qualities. Results show the framework provides a structure to gain insight into the nature and meaning of vocational knowledge, and is valuable to describe characteristics in terms of knowledge components such as technical procedures or the social and occupational environment, and qualities such as richness, complexity and specificity. Additionally, to use an existing framework - originally developed in the contexts of ICT and Social Work - its usefulness is explored in a new context, namely, the hospitality industry. Recommendations about the framework serving as a potential tool to support students' learning processes are provided.
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One of the most important issues in vocational education is the interaction between learning at school and at different workplaces. Students need to transfer what they have learned in and between ...these different learning arenas. However, little agreement exists among researchers on how to conceptualise and empirically study transfer of learning. This article aims to enhance our understanding of this process in technical vocational education by adding a new perspective on transfer: the phenomenological lifeworld approach. Eleven interviews with students enrolled in the Energy and Industry programmes at a Swedish upper-secondary school were conducted. Three transfer themes emerged from the data: learning for new situations, variation and integration of theory and practice. The student perspective, based on the lifeworld approach shows that the different learning arenas - the school and workplaces - can complement each other. The learning arenas offer different opportunities for learning, and learning in both arenas is necessary in order to prepare for an unknown future, according to the students in this study.
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Formative assessment has the potential to incite co-regulatory activities that foster student’s development of self-regulatory skills. Teacher often intend to use formative assessment to foster ...self-regulation. However, this requires purposeful interaction between students and teachers. To improve co-regulatory formative assessment implementation, research and professional development needs to pay attention to what co-regulatory formative assessment look like. This participatory study explores if and how the process of formative assessment–described in five phases of the formative assessment cycle –facilitates teachers to explicate concrete student and teacher behavior in their formative classroom that intends to stimulate self-regulated learning. Teachers of a longitudinal formative assessment professional development project participated in three activities in which a variety of data was collected. The results show that using the five phases of the formative assessment cycle helps to concretize co-regulatory formative assessment behavior that relates to various phases of regulation. They also show that starting from a student perspective, explicating expected student behavior and using this to explicate related teacher behavior, challenges teacher’s formative assessment intentions and implementations. The activities make teachers realize the importance of purposefully designing co-regulatory formative assessments. Teachers explicated examples describe actual student-teacher co-regulatory interactions in the formative classroom and they are found to differ in the extent to which they are teacher-directed or student-directed. This challenges our thinking on the co-regulation processes incited by formative assessments and how this can stimulate students to develop self-regulatory skills.
Serious games foster the acquisition of complex problem-solving skills. Assessment of such skills should be in line with instruction, and within a serious game environment its content validity should ...equal face-to-face assessment. Research on assessment in serious gaming has remained rather scarce. This article shows how assessment can be implemented in serious gaming in a way that assures content validity. The core of the authors' validation method entails mapping learning activities (as contained in the game scenario) on performance indicators and outputs (as derived from formal attainment levels). They present how they have elaborated and applied the method for an assessment game for ICT managers in secondary vocational education. They describe the procedure and extent to which this assessment is content-valid compared to face-to-face assessment.
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In programmatic assessment (PA), an arrangement of different assessment methods is deliberately designed across the entire curriculum, combined and planned to support both robust decision-making and ...student learning. In health sciences education, evidence about the merits and pitfalls of PA is emerging. Although there is consensus about the theoretical principles of PA, programs make diverse design choices based on these principles to implement PA in practice, fitting their own contexts. We therefore need a better understanding of how the PA principles are implemented across contexts—within and beyond health sciences education. In this study, interviews were conducted with teachers/curriculum designers representing nine different programs in diverse professional domains. Research questions focused on: (1) design choices made, (2) whether these design choices adhere to PA principles, (3) student and teacher experiences in practice, and (4) context-specific differences between the programs. A wide range of design choices were reported, largely adhering to PA principles but differing across cases due to contextual alignment. Design choices reported by almost all programs include a backbone of learning outcomes, data-points connected to this backbone in a longitudinal design allowing uptake of feedback, intermediate reflective meetings, and decision-making based on a multitude of data-points made by a committee and involving multi-stage procedures. Contextual design choices were made aligning the design to the professional domain and practical feasibility. Further research is needed in particular with regard to intermediate-stakes decisions.
The goal of this article is to contribute to the validation of a self-evaluation method, which can be used by schools to evaluate the quality of their Competence Assessment Program (CAP). The ...outcomes of the self-evaluations of two schools are systematically compared: a novice school with little experience in competence-based education and assessment, and an innovative school with extensive experience. The self-evaluation was based on 12 quality criteria for CAPs, including both validity and reliability, and criteria stressing the importance of the formative function of assessment, such as meaningfulness and educational consequences. In each school, teachers, management and examination board participated. Results show that the two schools use different approaches to assure assessment quality. The innovative school seems to be more aware of its own strengths and weaknesses, to have a more positive attitude towards teachers, students, and educational innovations, and to explicitly involve stakeholders (i.e., teachers, students, and the work field) in their assessments. This school also had a more explicit vision of the goal of competence-based education and could design its assessments in accordance with these goals.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK
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