Deliberative Assessment for Integrative, Reflective, and Lifewide Learning

by Darren Cambridge

Both because a growing number of staff wish for their pedagogical practice to be informed by systematic examination of results and because governmental and professional bodies are increasingly requiring it, there is a growing consensus that we need to be more intentional about documenting student learning, providing evidence of the results of teaching and learning. However, we are considerably less close to consensus about how to define what aspects of learning we have a responsibility to understand, what counts as evidence of learning, and what it means to document it. Eportfolios have potential both as a means for producing the needed documentation and as a tool for facilitating inclusive deliberations about the purposes and processes of systematic inquiry into the results of teaching and learning.

Drawing on political theory and the practice of the scholarship of teaching and learning, this talk will consider some of the key philosophical and policy questions about the scope of learning, the definition of evidence, and the process of inquiry into them. Deliberative assessment will be offered as a model that embraces a broader understanding of each of these concepts than the standard model of portfolio assessment, a model that the distinctive capabilities of PebblePad can support. Deliberative assessment has particular promise for systematic documentation of learning outcomes often considered ineffable or essentially contested, such as leadership and social responsibility.