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Self-Determination Theory as a Framework for Student Assessment Well-being
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- Author(s) / Creator(s)
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Abstract: Classroom assessment appears to be a source of constant stress and anxiety in the lives of post-secondary students. As something unique to students, assessment is easily identified as an important contributor to the mental health crisis on post-secondary campus. Despite this, reforms to classroom assessment seem difficult to enact. It is possible that some of instructors’ hesitations to revise assessment practices may come from a misperception that doing so would compromise the rigour and validity of assessment data. In other words: assessment has to be stressful to be doing its job. This logic, however, is a false dichotomy because quality assessments designs must attend to student well-being in order to make strong validity inferences about student learning. In this chapter, we use self-determination theory to unify student well-being and high quality assessment design under one rigorous and well-established theory of human motivation and flourishing. Self-determination theory not only offers conceptualisations of well-being itself but also empirically vetted ways to support well-being through strategies that satisfy basically psychological needs and can be directly applied to the design of assessments in ways that enhance validity. We tailor a variety of these strategies to assessment specifically and thereby offering post-secondary instructors theory-guided recommendations that they can apply to assessment assessment format. By pairing a robust psychosocial theory on well-being with contemporary thinking about validity, we show that concerns for quality assessment and student well-being are complementary rather than adversary.
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- Date created
- 2024-01-30
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- Subjects / Keywords
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- Type of Item
- Article (Draft / Submitted)