Why Students Don ’ t Like Assessment and How to Change Their Perceptions in 21 st Century Pedagogies

In more than thirty years of teaching and testing students of all ages and across all learning stages—primary, secondary, college, university undergraduates and postgraduates—I am yet to find a student who looked forward to an assessment task they were to complete. Why? One might ask: why don’t students like assessment? And how can we change their perceptions? To lay the groundwork for answering these perplexing and yet important pedagogical questions, this paper starts with an explanation of the meaning of educational assessment. It then delineates the different types of assessments and their intended purposes before examining reasons why students don’t like assessment. This is followed by suggestions of what we could do as pedagogues, to make assessment meaningful and attractive to students in 21st century learning so as to change their perceptions of assessment. The paper argues that just as effective teaching and learning need to change from the orthodoxy 3Rs and core subjects that drove the Industrial Age to a New Learning Paradigm which includes the Super 4Cs Skills of the 21st century, (critical thinking and problem solving, collaboration, creativity and innovation, and communication), so does assessment need to change if it is to serve its moral purpose in 21st century education.


Introduction
In educational practice it is well known that students don't like assessment.And so it is quite intriguing to ask the question, why don't students like assessment.And equally important is the question, what can we do as pe-dagogues to change students' perceptions about assessment?This paper answers these questions in several steps.Firstly, it explains the meaning of assessment in education.Secondly, it delineates the different types of assessment that are common in education and the purposes they are designed to serve.Thirdly, it discusses reasons why students don't like assessment.Fourthly, it suggests different approaches and strategies that could be applied to make assessment meaningful and attractive to students and therefore change their perceptions.The paper concludes that these approaches are needed as part of the New Learning Paradigm which seeks to equip students with the skills they will need to succeed both at school and in life after school in the 21 st century.

Meanings of Assessment
Assessment can be defined in many ways but one authentic way is to look for its meaning in the etiology of the word assessment.The word "assessment" has its origin in Latin where the verb "assidere" means "to sit with".I like this approach to finding the meaning of assessment because in this search for meaning the verb reveals that in conducting an assessment you should see yourself as sitting with your students and working with them rather than see assessment as something you do to them or give to them and let them sort it out by themselves.I see this as the new meaning of assessment because the orthodoxy theories of assessment saw assessment primarily as a means of finding out what learners knew.Let's have a look at the traditional definitions of assessment and how they differ from the more contemporary definitions.

Distinction between Summative and Formative Types of Assessment
For example, Harlen (2007) says that educational assessment "involves deciding, collecting and making judgments about evidence relating to the goals of learning being assessed" (p.86).Similarly, Lambert and Lines (2000) assert that assessment "is the process of gathering, interpreting, recording and using information about pupils' responses to educational tasks" (p.96).These defines align well with Gronlund and Waugh (2008) who say that assessment in education refers to "the broad category that includes all the various methods used to determine the extent to which the students have achieved the intended learning outcomes of the instruction" (p.24).These definitions frame the meaning of assessment in terms of what is generally described as summative assessment.Such assessment, according to Waugh and Gronlund (2013) is conducted "at the end of instruction for the purpose of certifying mastery or assigning grades" (p.9).This paper argues that for our pedagogical practices to meet the changing and diverse needs of learners in the twenty-first century, we need to shift from this antiquated meaning of assessment to the more constructivist understanding of assessment which defines it in terms of its contribution to active learning.This worldview of assessment is best characterized as formative assessment and defined as "assessment that serves the twin purposes of improving effective teaching and learning" (Kivunja, 2015a: p. 220).Guided by this worldview, assessment is seen as having potential to assist students' understanding while at the same time improving teaching and curriculum development.

The Gardner Analogy to Help with the Distinction
The differences between summative and formative types of assessment are highlighted very well by Shirley Clarke's (2001) analogy in which she compares assessment to the actions of a gardener and their impacts on his or her plants.In the analogy, Clarke (2001: p. 2) says: If we think of our children as plants ... summative assessment of the plants is the process of simply measuring them.The measurements might be interesting to compare and analyse, but, in themselves, they do not affect the growth of the plants.Formative assessment, on the other hand, is the garden equivalent of feeding and watering the plants-directly affecting their growth.(p. 21) This analogy helps to crystallize the differences between these two types of assessment and is also well supported by Cowie and Bell (1999) who say that whereas "Formative assessment is the process used by teachers and children to recognize and respond to pupil learning, in order to enhance that learning during the activity or task" (p.104), summative assessment is evaluation of what has been learnt after the teaching and learning have been concluded.Consequently, while the former has potential to directly influence learning as it takes place, the latter cannot impact on current learning, but only presents an ex-post view and can only, at best, inform future teaching and learning.Thus, large-scale summative assessment has been used to effectively provide a ranking order of schools and students mainly for the purposes of accountability rather than improvement of learning and teaching (Kifer, 2001).For example, national or statewide assessment tests are normally given to students at the end of the school year when all the teaching and learning for the year has been concluded.By the time the results of those tests are released, usually months later, the students who completed the tests have already left school or moved on to the next stage of learning and therefore the results cannot influence their learning or teaching.Moreover, the summative nature of the results tends to render them useless for indicating the details which would enable the teacher to target particular areas to improve teaching and facilitate learning (Barton, 2002).

Purposes of Assessment
Assessment tasks can be designed and implemented differently to serve different purposes.Although the general purpose could be seen as providing a picture of student learning, showing how students have met the learning outcomes, assessment tasks can also be designed to monitor the extent to which students are engaging with learning and the extent to which they are meeting learning outcomes so that strategies can be put in place to enable students to close the gap between where they are and where they should be in terms of learning outcomes.In view of these broad possibilities, assessment can be seen as serving either summative or formative purposes.These are discussed below.

Purposes of Summative Assessment
The primary purpose of summative assessment is to provide "the main means of communicating the nature and level of a pupil's achievements at various points in their schooling and at the conclusion of their studies" (Kivunja, 2015a: p. 89).Essentially, summative assessment is used to report on students' past performance.As well explained by Bloom, Madaus and Hastings (1971) "summative evaluation is directed toward a much more general assessment of the degree to which the larger outcomes have been attained" (p.61).It is best used to evaluate student learning at the end of a unit of study, task or project, by comparing the current performance, task or project against some standard or benchmark.Because of the ex-post nature of summative assessment, information from summative assessments can only be used to guide students' efforts and teaching strategies in subsequent learning.In practice this would be a different cohort of students as those that completed the assessment would have moved on to the next stage of learning or to different schools altogether.Black (1998) and his colleague in Black and Wiliam, (2003) assert that the primary purpose of assessment should be formative assessment.These leaders in the field propose that improving students' own understanding of how they can learn better to improve their educational outcomes is the most important purpose of assessment.For example, in strongly advocating for formative assessment Black (1998) says that because formative assessment provides feedback both to the teacher and students, it serves the twin purposes of improving effective teaching and learning.He argues that formative assessment does this well because "no system… can adjust and adapt as it performs its task without that frequent information about the operation of its system which is needed to modify the input in light of the actual progress of the system" (p.25).Formative assessment has the potential to provide frequent information about learning and teaching which can be used to improve teaching effectiveness and students' learning outcomes simultaneously.For example, Center (2014) explains that formative assessments can be used to help the teacher identify students' strengths and weaknesses.The teacher can then adopt strategies that target areas that need additional or different work to help struggling students overcome their learning difficulties.Pollard (2005) suggests that the mere mention of the term assessment tends to cause anxiety among people.The anxiety arises mainly because, as Readman and Allen (2013) note, "most people automatically associate the term with what they experienced at school and for many of those people the term conjures up unhappy experiences" (p.xviii).That is not surprising considering that "traditionally, standardized tests were written to measure how many children at particular ages with particular social and/or physical orientations fail school" (Latham et al., 2006: p. 263).Thus, assessment "traditionally focused on failure" (Latham et al., 2006: p. 263).Moreover, as Watkins, Carnell and Lodge (2007) warn, "there are many different, competing, overlapping and sometimes unexplored and unquestioned meanings that are associated with assessment.Some of these will support and promote effective learning, but some may even frustrate effective learning" (pp.141-142).And Brady and Kennedy (2009) suggest that there are "blurred lines between terms such as assessment, tests and examinations, [and that] assessment itself is not a single-dimensional construct" (p.16).When students are asked the meaning of assessment, their responses tend to focus on assessment as a means of determining whether they have learnt or met the learning outcomes.They make no connection as to whether the assessment processes can be used as feedback which they can use to improve their learning or as feedback to the teachers so they can improve their teaching.This understanding of assessment and its purpose appears quite common.For example, in an exercise that Readman and Allen (2013) did with their undergraduate students to gain some understanding of what the students thought assessment is, students' answers included that assessment is "how teachers are able to measure how well students understand the material being taught; a tool to understand the position a student is at with the assigned work" (pp.4-5).In a similar exercise conducted with a group of six teachers, Watkins, Carnell and Lodge (2007) found that the teachers said that assessment was "checking for learning, validating learning, testing out against criteria, celebrating attainment" (p.142).Readman and Allen (2013), actually found that some of their students were "negative about assessment for a variety of reasons that are usually related to their own experiences of schooling" (p.5).According to Harlen and Deakin-Crick (2002), this negativity appears to be related to five reasons.Firstly, following the results of an assessment task in which students don't do well, there is usually a lowering of the self-esteem, particularly among the less successful students.This can reduce their effort and their image.Secondly, in preparing for assessment, there is a shift towards performance goals.In other words, the students tend to simply cram the subject content so as to pass the exam rather than achieving the learning goals.Thirdly, students inevitably get anxious before a test, especially of a summative nature.No one wants to reveal to others what they don't know.Fourthly, students dislike the judgments of value which are made about them by others, and by themselves, as a result of their performance in a test.Fifthly, students tend to develop a rather negative attitude towards assessment because of their perception that their learning opportunities tend to be restricted by teaching that focuses primarily on what will be assessed.Thus it is clear that students don't like assessment because they associate it with some negative experiences most of which relate to fear, anxiety or failure.

How to Make Assessment Attractive to Students in 21 st Century Learning
The first step in making assessment attractive to students and in changing their attitude towards assessment is making sure that the assessment is beneficial to students.This should be both in the short run as well as in the long term.Assessment strategies, like instructional strategies, need to reflect the knowledge and skills demanded for productive employment in the 21 st century if they are to be meaningful to students and to serve the moral purpose of education; which according to Fullan (2001) is to help graduates become productive citizens.Those skills include the Super 4Cs skills for the 21 st century, namely critical thinking and problem solving, collaboration, creativity and innovation and communication (Kivunja, 2015b).Additionally, they include skills from what Kivunja (2014) calls "the New Learning Paradigm" (p.84).The New Learning Paradigm comprises Life and Career Skills (namely leadership and responsibility, teamwork, initiative and self-direction, flexibility and adaptability, social and cross-cultural interaction, career and learning self-reliance, productivity and accountability) and the Information, Media and Technology skills, (namely computing literacy, information literacy, ICT literacy and media literacy).Summative tests which require students to provide yes or no answers, or select from true or false choices, or pick which of the given multiple answers is the correct one, fail the test of skilling students in the Super 4Cs or any of the other skills outlined here as needed for success in the 21 st century.
The knowledge economy of the 21 st century calls for learning outcomes that require students to engage in deep learning and solving real life problems, critical thinking, communication, creativity and communication.Those outcomes present learning as a process rather than an end product.Therefore, assessment of those learning outcomes should also be process oriented rather than product oriented.This means that assessment for 21 st century learning should be looking at students' progress and letting students know of their progress and use that knowledge to improve their performance on their way to achieving the learning outcomes.This means that assessments that align well with 21 st century skills should be formative rather than summative assessment.This proposition is well supported by an understanding of what I call the power of the assessment feedback loop illustrated in Figure 1.So, what is the assessment feedback loop and how does it make assessment more attractive to students in 21 st century learning?These questions are addressed in the following subsections.

The Assessment Feedback Loop
According to Heritage (2010) the processes that comprise the assessment feedback loop can be represented as a series of clockwise arrows which starts at process 1 "Defining learning goals, progression and criteria", and progresses through the other seven processes illustrated in Figure 1, to finish at "Closing the gap" in number 8, which allows the formative nature of the process to start all over again as a new cycle at number 9.
As illustrated in Figure 1, the processes involved are: 1) Defining learning goals, learning progression and criteria for success 2) Elicit evidence of learning 3) Interpret the evidence 4) Identify the gaps in knowledge and skills 5) Gather and provide feedback 6) Respond to learning needs 7) Scaffold learning in zone of proximal development 8) Close the gap 9) Define learning goals in a new iteration of these processes.

Strategies to Maximize the Effectiveness of the Assessment Feedback Loop
Each of the processes outlined above can be maximized through the use of well-planned strategies.For example, in process 1, Defining learning goals, learning progression and criteria for success, you, the teacher, articulate the learning goals for the lesson and stage as derived from the learning progression for your class on the current Source: Kivunja (2015a: p. 239) and Heritage (2010: p. 11).C. Kivunja topic.You should also determine the learning outcomes or criteria, which the children need to meet to demonstrate knowledge and achievement of the defined learning goals, and make them very clear to the children.In process 2, Elicit evidence of learning, as the children engage with the learning activities, you use a variety of strategies to gather evidence on how students are learning and moving towards the defined goal.This process should involve a wide range of assessment tasks so that every child has an opportunity to demonstrate what they have learnt.For example these could include questioning, observation, representations, performance, demonstration, exit cards, notes from the children to you, worksheets completed, or more structured, curriculum-embedded assessments.In process 3, Interpret the evidence, you examine the assessment data in light of the success criteria defined in process 1 to determine how student learning is occurring.In process 4, Identify the gaps in knowledge and skills, the gap is defined as "the difference between your students' current understanding and intended learning goals" (Kivunja, 2015a: p. 240) as defined in process 1.This process is so crucial to maximizing the effectiveness of the assessment feedback loop because only when you have an accurate understanding of the gap can you take steps to bridge it.Bridging this gap is the primary purpose of formative assessment.As well explained by Sadler, (1989: p. 121) assessment data are "feedback only when they are used to alter the gap" (p.121) between what your students know and what they need to know according to the criteria defined in process 1.And so, in the Gather and provide feedback process 5, the assessment feedback loop is maximized when you use feedback to help your students take steps to improve learning towards the learning goals articulated in process 1.In Respond to learning needs in process 6, you use the feedback from process 5 to plan the instructional strategies that will enable you to place appropriate, additional demands on your students, to help them take responsibility for their own learning as they pursue the fulfillment of their learning outcomes articulated in process 1. Process 7, Scaffold learning in zone of proximal development, is where you have the opportunity to provide appropriate support to enable your students to move from what they already know to what they need to learn to close the gap.Working along the scaffold, and using the feedback and their own learning strategies, your students can incrementally internalize learning as they gain a deeper understanding and learn new skills needed to close the gap.This gets them ready for process 8, Close the gap, While closing the gap appears to be the final element in the formative assessment process, you should realize that it actually forms the beginning of the next set of learning goals that you define for your class and thus start a new formative assessment cycle shown at process 9 in Figure 1.

How the Processes of the Assessment Feedback Loop Align with 21 st Century Learning
Several leaders in the field of assessment have described in considerable detail how assessment feedback can be used to help learners achieve learning goals, many of which align well with the 21 st century learning goals delineated earlier in this paper.For example, the ARIA Committee (2009: p. 20) headed by Gardner recommended that the overriding objective of any assessment should be the improvement of learning and every assessment should use a range of methods that enable the various goals of learning and progression towards them to be addressed.In particular, the ARIA Committee recommended that the methods used in assessment should address the skills, knowledge or understanding being assessed without restricting the breadth of the curriculum (Gardner, Harlen, Hayward, & Stobart, 2008).This is where the Super 4Cs skills as well as those that sit in the other three domains of 21 st century skills (P21, 2014a) can be embedded in the assessment tasks.To encourage creativity among learners, the Committee recommended that assessment should provide students with opportunities to show what they can do by completing tasks that address the full range of goals of learning.In process 2, teachers elicit and gain evidence from their ongoing assessment which they use to help students' learning.This trains the students' cognitive abilities as critical thinkers and also encourages them to solve their learning problems as consistent with this Super C (P21, 2014b).The assessment feedback loop calls for the results of assessment to be relayed to students as soon as possible so as to enable links to be made between the results and how they can be used to improve ongoing student performance.This helps the students to see where the problems are and to think creatively about how to solve those problems to improve their performance.When results are returned soon after completing an assessment task, students can easily communicate to the teacher what aspects of the instruction they need more assistance with; thus combining 21 st century skills of improved communication, collaboration and problem solving.
The feedback loop should be a regular feature of classroom experiences and instruction so students can see the links between instruction and assessment of how they are engaging with the instruction and meeting the learning outcomes.Similarly, classroom assessment can provide a very useful source of data that can be used to inform teachers on how the feedback can be used to modify their teaching so as to achieve better student learning outcomes rather than sorting out students and assigning discriminatory grades.It can be used to indicate what the teachers taught well as well as those aspects of their instruction that need either greater work or different strategies.This gives teachers the opportunity to pay special attention to those aspects of the unit or subject in which the assessment revealed that many of their students did not meet the required learning outcomes.This is a pedagogical win-win because it helps both the teachers and the students to develop a positive attitude towards the assessment tasks.The students see assessment as helping them to learn rather than finding out what they don't know.Teachers' perceptions of assessment also change as they see it as an essential ingredient into the instruction and not something that happens apart from and after the instruction has occurred.When the feedback loop is used as a regular feature of instruction it can very easily be used to diagnose and analyze individual student performance to better identify how they can improve individual performance.
Applying the feedback loop helps students see that the assessment was related to instruction.There is nothing as frustrating and annoying to students as an assessment task that does not test the learning outcomes which were emphasized in the instruction.Students see this kind of assessment as a waste of their time, frustration of their efforts and a basis for not trusting teachers who give such assignments (Guskey, 2000) and for disliking assessment.This problem arises mainly because assessment processes are often not transparent and they keep students guessing as to what will be in the test.This approach appears to persist in teachers' professional practice because that's how they were taught and assessed when they were students many years ago.The 21 st century approach to making assessment part of instruction seeks to break this antiquated mold where students prepare for a test by trying to guess what will be in the test.Part of the implementation of the feedback loop is to make sure that the assessment tasks align well with instruction and learning outcomes, so that when the feedback is looped back to students they can clearly see how the questions related to what they had been taught.As Bloom, Madaus and Hastings (1981) point out, this way the feedback serves as a good indicator of the students' progress and helps them identify where learning problems lie and how they can be addressed to improve their learning.This does not mean that in making assessments align with what was taught we are either telling students what is in the test or teaching to the test.Rather, we are making sure that the test is not testing some obscure aspect of the concepts or skills not dealt with during instruction.It is simply being fair to students and making sure that the test only tests what was taught well and occupied a significant part of the unit or subject taught.Essentially, if something wasn't taught well, it wouldn't be fair to require students to know it well and respond to questions about it in an assessment task.However, if the feedback reveals that there was anything in the assessment task that covered content knowledge, understanding or skills that had not been well taught during the instructional phase, then the teacher can use this feedback reflectively and plan to teach those areas better.Used this way, the feedback loop gives teachers the opportunity to reflect on the types of questions that comprised the assessment task.Were they set beyond the cognitive abilities of the children?Were they worded clearly to be understood by every child?Did they adequately target the knowledge, understanding and skills they were intended to examine?Why did many of the students fail to provide right answers to these questions?Were the examples given during instruction realistic and authentic?Did I explain sufficiently for this concept to be understood by all the children?What is this feedback telling me about what I need to do differently to help the children achieve the learning outcomes?Feedback which shows that a high percentage of the students could not answer a question correctly suggests a high likelihood that the related subject matter or skills were not taught well.The problem in this case, is not with the students, but with the teacher.Such feedback points towards the need for the teacher to change the instructional strategies that they used previously, consider using more concrete examples and giving better explanations to the class.This also encourages the children to exercise leadership and responsibility for their learning as they can take initiative to use the feedback to improve their performance.As pointed out earlier, (see section 4), such leadership, initiative and self-directed learning are key aspects of the New Learning Paradigm (Kivunja, 2014).
The feedback loop provides for gathering data that constitute evidence of learning, that help to identify gaps between what the children know and should know, and how to respond to students' learning needs to "close the gap".This way, the feedback loop creates opportunity for teachers to embark upon new and more effective, corrective strategies that help to close the gap.This does not mean that the feedback loop only favors students who experienced problems so they can be helped.Rather, the feedback also indicates those students who performed well.The teacher can then design learning activities which challenge these students at a higher-cognitive level or higher skills so that the high performers too can also benefit from the feedback loop and engage in deeper learning activities.
As teachers apply the feedback loop they get to develop their assessment practices through a variety of professional learning activities including reflecting upon and sharing experiences with colleagues, the use of effective questioning, providing opportunities for self-and peer assessment, allowing the sharing of learning objectives, and identifying the next steps in learning (Gardner, 2013).This is consistent with the findings of a group of experts on assessment who concluded that assessment that benefits students and raises standards should provide effective feedback to pupils; involve pupils in their own learning, and provide opportunities for adjusting teaching to take account of the results of assessment (Broadfoot et al., 2014).In particular, these experts recommended that assessment that benefits students the most should provide feedback that enables "pupils to be able to assess themselves and understand how to improve" (Broadfoot et al., 2014: pp. 4-5).The assessment feedback loop meets this recommends very well and is suggested here as a strategy that has great potential to make assessment attractive to students and change their perceptions in a positive way.

Conclusions
Thus, the collective wisdom of many experts in the field of assessment suggests that if we are to change students' attitudes towards and perceptions of assessment in 21 st century pedagogies, we must make assessment benefit their learning.If all we are doing is measuring their performance after a unit of work or at the end of their year of study, this kind of summative assessment might serve other puroses, but it does not add value to their current learning.As well articulated by Waugh and Gronlund (2013) "instruction is more effective when well-designed assessments are an integral part of the instructional process" (p.14).Assessment designed this way is formative assessment and includes the powerful assessment feedback loop discussed above.As cogently asked in Inside the Black Box by Black and Wiliam (1998), "Is there evidence that improving formative assessment raises standards?"(p.3).While arguing that "formative assessment is not another magic bullet for education" (p. 3) these leaders in the field assert that "innovations which include the strengthening of formative assessment produce significant, and often substantial learning gains" (p.3).These positive possibilities of the feedback loop of formative assessment are helped further by an understanding that "classroom assessment is socially constructed: that is, assessment events or incidents are accomplished through, and situated within, the everyday routines of teacher-pupil interaction in the classroom" (Torrance & Pryor, 2002: p. 131).This is also the reason why Kivunja (2015a) in Teaching, Learning and Assessment posits what he calls "the trilogical nature of teaching, learning and assessment" (p.76) which he defines as: An effective pedagogy of teaching, learning and assessment which needs to be treated as three essential pillars of a holistic approach in which assessment provides information on student progress to students and the teacher, so both the teacher and the students can take steps to improve teaching and learning.(Kivunja, 2015a: p. 76) Along this thinking, Kivunja (2015a) also emphasizes "the central role of assessment in teaching and learning as part of the teaching and learning cycle" (p.113).Cast this way, it is easy to see the positive intents of formative assessment and how they can be brought to have a positive impact on learning, motivation "and at the same time contributing to the process of creating understanding" (Torrance & Pryor, 2002: p. 131).In Feedback for Learning, this is also very well articulated by Susan Askew (2000: p. 37) who asserts that "to close the gap" identified in the assessment feedback loop, "the learning intentions need to be carried through to the feedback stage" (p.37) so that the teacher gives: feedback against focused learning objectives of the task (whatever the child was asked to pay attention to), highlighting where success occurred against those objectives and suggesting where improvement might take place against those objectives.We must give appropriate prompts or strategies to enable children to make those improvements.(p.37) The paper concludes that only when we can make assessment a formative part of students' learning shall we make children and students appreciate the beneficial effects of assessment to their learning, and positively change their attitudes as well as their perceptions of assessment in 21 st century pedagogies.Only then shall we enable assessment to play its legitimate role in helping education meet its moral purpose, rather than appear to be a threat to the well-being and academic success of students.

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.The assessment feedback loop [All flows are clockwise].
Here, you want to know, for example, what knowledge the children have, what they understand, what their misconceptions are, and what skills are or are not being acquired.