Is the way how adults learners are assessed, an effective one? What role technology can play in this all?

In this article, I would like to share with you a personal reflection on the way how adults and non traditional students are today assessed both in Academic and Corporate contexts. With non-traditional students I mean a new type of students who have a professional career and very often family commitments while they decide to undertake their academic and professional studies.

I was actually a student in my Master when this topic about assessment was brought to my attention by professors there and peers.

“I became aware that the way how we learn is actually very much connected with the way how we are assessed at the end of any course work.”

So if we will be assessed at the end of the coursework with a test then we will tend to focus very much on the content provided , memorising the learning material as much as possible in order to be able to provide the right answer to the final quiz and pass the module as soon as possible.

It happens to me indeed to see that planning for a valuable team work in a coursework without assessing students on the work done in team, usually leads students to avoid to focalise their energies on working in team but only on tasks that could better help preparing them for the assessment required.

This happens very much for corporate training where training providers create small “Learning Pills” of content for employees that should absorb the required knowledge in the shorter time available and who are tested over it. While this is very much a required process in some contexts, it became too often an automatic “modus operandi” used when teaching adults, without having made a specific reflection behind this choice.

The Pedagogy of adult education (or better Andragogy) that I have already discussed elsewhere tells us to recognise that adults are usually self-directed learners, very much interested in making connections with their own work environment while learning and very often able to identify by themselves the resources they would like to use for achieving their learning goals. They also tend to learn more in group because they can share common professional interests. They can reflect and learn from each others and in this way undertake a personal journey of transformation and becoming more autonomous learners.

“The concept of Transformation here is key in my view and everything is actually linked to the meaning we attach to the word “learning”: is actually learning considered as a process in which we just acquire some knowledge or a process that can lead us to a certain degree of transformation as adults and as person?”

I strongly believe in the latter of the twos definitions since it is well known that the majority of the knowledge we acquire is easily forgotten while time passes by. This is not unfortunately the view of many companies and of several academic leaders where learners are just assessed via a quiz or a test. However the main question we have to pose ourselves is also: What we would like our learners to achieve with the training we provide them?

I also believe that the introduction of technologies in teaching and learning online should not emulate what already happens in presence also in connection to assessment, but technology should be used as a tool that can help us to design online courses, learning and assessment in a new, creative and original way if compared with the more traditional one.

“So why perpetuating the use of quiz and test for our adult learners while technology allows us to assess them, using inimagined tools and techniques for achieving different goals?”

For example a form of assessment that I strongly value for adults is self-assessment, where students are valued for the depth of the reflection they produce on their own learning journey or task. This can also take the form of a peers or group assessment where course peers reflect on the work done either inside their team or by another peer and provide useful deep and constructive feedback to them.

“Even if these techniques can also be applied face to face, technology allows for deeper and longer reflections that can give inputs to interesting conversations if used in an online learning forum for example.”

There different peers exchange views, ideas and learn from each others on an extended period of time, while activating a personal transformative process.

Although there are already some good examples of sounding andragogical assessments undertaken by some universities, I hope both the academic and the corporate contexts will think about adult assessment more and more in these terms or in other new and original ways, while forgetting time after time about quiz and test.