Creating Communities of Shared Practice: The challenges of assessment use in learning and teaching

Teachers and researchers in the field of educational assessment have a strong professional interest in evaluating practices that constitute effective educational assessment at the classroom level. In pursuing these goals it is fundamental for teachers and pupils to grow in a community of shared practice where nothing in the assessment process is hidden and students become assessors of their own learning. The challenge for students and teachers within present-day classrooms is understanding and learning how these communities are created. This paper is based on action research carried out to investigate our own teaching of the subject of assessment at postgraduate level. The focus of the research was to integrate current research evidence within educational assessment into our own professional practice. Such research suggests that to improve learning and indeed teaching, educational assessment must be formative in both function and purpose and must put the student at the centre of the assessment process. The paper describes the processes and procedures by which common meanings of published criteria and assessment quality for masters level coursework held by one community of assessors were shared and interpreted by students to enable them to articulate their own learning through student-self assessment.