This is a decommissioned version of ERA which is running to enable completion of migration processes. All new collections and items and all edits to existing items should go to our new ERA instance at https://ualberta.scholaris.ca - Please contact us at erahelp@ualberta.ca for assistance!
- 115 views
- 128 downloads
Self-Determination Theory as a Framework for Student Assessment Well-being
-
- Author(s) / Creator(s)
-
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.
-
- Date created
- 2024-01-30
-
- Subjects / Keywords
-
- Type of Item
- Article (Draft / Submitted)