Integrating principles of well-being and assessment, with Professor Andrea Creech

Teach.Learn.Share: Episode five

“In a higher education context, ultimately, the assessment should always be in service of learning.”

Andrea Creech

Do the assessment choices instructors make support students’ learning and their well-being? To close our five-part miniseries, my co-host, Jasmine Parent, and I wanted to hear an instructor’s perspective. In this episode, we’ve invited Dr. Andrea Creech, Professor of Music Pedagogy at the Schulich School of Music, to join the conversation. Andrea shares insights into how assessment forms an integral part of her pedagogy, itself shaped and guided by principles of well-being. These principles include a sense of belonging, self-efficacy, autonomy, and a belief in one’s capacity to make meaningful contributions to our given contexts.

Jasmine and I engage with Andrea on topics such as whether addressing students’ well-being when designing assessment tasks jeopardizes academic rigor. For Andrea, it’s not a trade-off. Instead, well-being, in the sense of experiencing maximum self-actualization through our learning, intersects intricately with deeply engaged learning. And deeply engaged learning is hard. It means stretching oneself. Listen to episode five to hear more about how academic rigor and well-being can go hand in hand when supported by assessment tasks that promote critical thinking, self-efficacy, a sense of purpose, and a sense of belonging in an academic community.

Access the transcript

Strategies Andrea shares in episode five include:

• Scaffolding assessments in such a way as to foster reasonable expectations of success among students. This can mean having students complete a series of low-stakes assessments. It can also mean being clear about what is being assessed, why that thing is being assessed, how it’s being assessed, and who is doing the assessing.
• Devoting some class time to reflection on criteria and rubrics. This practice helps ensure that students benefit from a clear understanding of the “what,” “why,” “how,” and “who” of an assessment task. Providing a framework for students to assess their own work allows students to catch things themselves and improve their work before submitting it for instructor assessment.
• Providing students with formative feedback to help them develop advanced skills in self-regulation and critical thinking. This strategy can not only improve students’ learning, but also make for a better experience for the instructor, who then gets to assess higher quality work.
• Helping students take responsibility in the feedback process by thinking about what they want feedback on. Engaging students to reflect on what they need feedback on can help them to think more critically about their work and the support they need to improve it—in other words, to close the gap between where they are and where they want to be. One strategy for fostering that responsibility is to ask students to submit an “interactive cover sheet” (learn more in the section “Strategy 2” of this resource).

Among the goals of the Teach.Learn.Share miniseries on assessment and well-being is to contribute to assessment literacy at our university and beyond. Assessment literacy is the capability of instructors and students to make sense of assessments and, once equipped with this understanding, to exercise more control over teaching and learning. According to Price (2012, p.10), assessment literacy includes sound knowledge of, among other things, the connectedness of assessment and learning. Understanding how assessment, learning, and well-being are intimately connected will undoubtedly help prepare our community for McGill’s new Policy on Assessment of Student Learning (PASL). Prioritizing assessment of student learning and promoting healthier learning environments are both integral to PASL, which takes effect in Fall 2024. But no need to wait until then to try out these valuable assessment strategies!

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References:

Price, M. (2012). Assessment literacy: The foundation for improving student learning. Oxford Brookes University.