Meaningful assessment: distinguishing learning outcome from product output in constructive alignment

CONTEXT It is easy for assessment practice to decline into the routine – doing what we have always done, or what we consider to be logistically possible – without proper attention to whether or not the assessment strategy really allows students to demonstrate their learning and matches with our learning objectives. Two decades ago Biggs (1996) drew attention to this issue in his articulation of the phrase “constructive alignment”. By this he meant that courses should be designed in such a way that the desired learning outcomes are articulated with some specificity, that teaching methods align with those desired outcomes, and that assessment tasks allow students the opportunity to perform their understanding (Biggs 1999). Biggs himself noted that this was very rarely done in universities and recent studies in engineering education suggest that we do no better than other disciplines in this regard (Borrego and Cutler 2010). In consequence, we do not always have the knowledge of our students’ learning that we claim to have and students struggle to know what they should be learning and how that should be done. The issue is compounded by the fact that students are assessmentorientated therefore assessment not aligned with learning objectives will seriously undermine achieving desired learning outcomes.