Investigating assessment in higher education: students’ perceptions

ABSTRACT

Drawing upon a wider piece of research, this paper focuses on students’ views of assessment in higher education. It reports on data collected from a total of 5,549 students in five Portuguese public universities. The study aims to investigate the psychometric properties of two scales, one measuring the purposes and effects associated by students with assessment; and the other determining the most commonly used assessment methods. Both scales demonstrated adequate validity based on internal structure and acceptable reliability. Findings indicate that students reported more purposes and effects associated with a summative dimension of assessment than with a formative dimension. The most commonly used methods were written tests/exams and collective methods. Statistically significant differences were found in assessment methods, purposes and effects.

KEYWORDS:

• Higher education
• assessment
• students
• formative and summative purposes

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. https://eacea.ec.europa.eu/national-policies/eurydice/content/first-cycle-programmes-60_en

Additional information

Funding

The project reported in this paper was funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (Government Funding Agency) (PTDC/MHCCED/2703/2014) and co-financed by European Regional Development Funds (FEDER), Competitiveness and Internationalization Operational Program (POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007562) within the framework of the CIEC (Research Center for Child Studies of the University of Minho) project under the reference UIDB/00317/2020 and UIDP/00317/2020.

Notes on contributors

Diana Pereira

Diana Pereira holds a Ph.D. in Educational Sciences – Curricular Development from the University of Minho/European Ph.D. (Malardalen University, Sweden). She is currently a researcher of the Research Centre on Child Studies at University of Minho. She has published her work in international journals and is a member of national and international projects.

Irene Cadime

Irene Cadime holds a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology from the University of Minho. She is currently a researcher and an integrated member of the Psychology Research Center, School of Psychology, University of Minho. She develops research in the fields of psychometry, language development and academic success

Maria Assunção Flores

Maria Assunção Flores works at the University of Minho, Portugal. She received her Ph.D. at the University of Nottingham, UK. Her research interests include teacher professionalism and identity, teacher education and professional development, teacher appraisal, curriculum, assessment and higher education. She has published extensively on these topics both nationally and internationally. She served as Chair of the International Study Association on Teachers and Teaching (ISATT) between 2013 and 2019.