Assessment as a matter of being and becoming: theorising student formation in assessment

ABSTRACT

When students enter higher education, they not only start learning and studying but begin a journey of becoming someone new in relation to themselves and to society. Scholarly research has increasingly emphasised this transformative element of higher education yet, to date, the role of assessment has received little attention in the processes of being and becoming. This is a crucial limitation given how profoundly assessment – exams, self- and peer-assessment, grades, rankings, metrics – characterises contemporary higher education. In this conceptual study, we propose a novel way of rethinking assessment as a matter of being and becoming. We bring together the separate fields of research on assessment and the philosophy of higher education by theorising other-formation and self-formation in and through assessment encounters. First, we discuss how assessment shapes students in ‘the measured university’ (other-formation). We then reconceptualise assessment from the viewpoint of how it promotes student agency and self-reflexivity (self-formation). Finally, we discuss some frequently used assessment practices in light of student self/other-formation. Our study sets the agenda of understanding student formation in and through assessment by laying the philosophical foundation for future studies.

KEYWORDS:

• Assessment
• student formation
• identity
• philosophy of higher education
• sociology

Introduction

Assessment is commonly discussed as a matter of teaching and learning. However, assessment carries a more profound social function. Through assessment, students become known. Assessment provides students with the means to know themselves, perhaps as ‘A students’, as ‘normally achieving students’, or perhaps as ‘the ones who does not care about grades’. It is thus important to understand how assessment shapes not only student learning but student identities as well (Barrow 2006). How students develop their professional identities indeed presents a crucially important question for higher education research and practice. Research is paying increasing attention to the social construction of students (Brooks and O’Shea 2021) and on the development of students’ professional identities (Trede, Macklin, and Bridges 2012). Yet, up to date, this area of research has largely overlooked assessment. Given how strongly assessment characterises contemporary higher education, there is a need to theorise how students are shaped and shape themselves through assessment.

We see it important to understand student formation particularly in higher education where assessment holds new academic purposes: it not only credentials student learning but also fosters it, as well as nurtures life-long learning (Boud and Soler 2016). Students might need to adjust to academic cultures where active learning and professional development are valued over testing and memorisation. In higher education, assessment provides the means for students to know themselves as future professionals. However, the longer-term processes of identity formation are rarely addressed in assessment research. As Brown and Knight (1994) noted, assessment reveals what truly matters in higher education ‘ … it is not the curriculum that shapes assessment, but assessment which shapes the curriculum and embodies the purposes of higher education.’ (12) The idea of assessment as a driving force in student learning is not new but is rarely discussed in relation to student identity formation.

We ground our conceptual study in the concept of student formation. It is widely acknowledged in philosophical literature that students are transformed by others and transform themselves throughout higher education. Underlying this argument are two different ideas. The first underlines the transformational power of higher education and pays little attention to the agency of students. This idea sees the importance of the environment including institutions, teachers, and peers in students’ formation, and is often regarded as other-formation. The second sees students as consciously reflexive agents who actively engage with the environment and navigate available resources. This is often referred to as student self-formation. While self-formation stresses students’ active agency and criticises making the environment the determinant power in students’ formation, it also emphasises the interactions between students and the environment and the social aspect of self-formation. The two ideas lead to diverging policies and practices of student formation and development in higher education. However, there is no intention to establish a dualism of self- and other- formation. Although they emphasise different aspects of student formation, they are not in an either/or relationship. As the paper will show later, this nuanced take of self- and other- formation is fundamental to our exploration of assessment and student formation.

The purpose of our conceptual study is to theorise assessment as a matter of student formation. Our theorisation provides the means to reorient discussions about assessment from the questions of teaching and learning to the questions of being and becoming. This study does not aim to provide the last word but to invoke further questions, discussion, alternative explanations and even disagreements. Our purpose is not to call for assessment reforms, nor to propose innovative assessment practices, but to situate assessment within wider philosophical conversations about the very purposes of higher education. In practice, we introduce a theorisation of student other- and self-formation, after which we connect these ideas with some key literature regarding assessment. This list of ideas is not final but provides a starting point for further conceptual and empirical investigations. To ensure the impact of our work, we discuss some practical implications of how assessment could support students’ agency and reflexivity and thus their self-formation. Our theoretical exploration is not tied to specific national or disciplinary contexts. Instead, our generalised statements need to be applied and interrogated in their contexts: they need to be tested, supplemented, expanded, nuanced and transformed. As such, we see our work itself being ‘in formation’.

Our two main arguments are:

• In the current landscapes of higher education, assessment predominantly builds on the idea of other-formation. Assessment provides the means for students to know themselves through grades, marks, and scores, and through the underlying values these practices build on. Assessment is most commonly designed and implemented by others, and for the purposes of others, potentially diminishing students’ own agency in relation to their formation.

• There has been less emphasis on assessment from the viewpoint of student self-formation. If we take student self-formation and reflexivity as key goals of higher education, then it is crucial to support these ideas through assessment, given its well-known role in student learning and studying. To meet these goals, assessment must be harnessed for supporting students’ agency in relation to their own formation.

Student other-formation

The other-formation idea sees students as objects and recipients who receive knowledge and information. According to this idea, students respond to the external environment, including the university policies, curricula, assessment, teachers, and peers, in a relatively passive manner. The human capital model and the idea of students’ skills development are two distinct examples of the other-formation idea in higher education (Marginson 2018a; Wheelahan, Moodie, and Doughney 2022). We will elaborate on both ideas below.

The other-formation idea believes that it is possible to have the external environment govern and even ‘shape’ the process and outcomes of student learning and development (Lee 2021; Marginson 2018a). Various mechanisms are currently employed in higher education for this governing and shaping purpose. Universities use assessment to govern students’ learning, while benchmarking the expected outcomes of learning against the expectations towards graduates by society and the labour market. Skills become one of the few, if not the only, foci of higher education (Wheelahan, Moodie, and Doughney 2022). As the dominant human capital model suggests, the employability of students is the key outcome of higher education, which requires students’ acquisition of measured skills and competencies (Marginson 2019). The content, quality, and effectiveness of higher education are judged by what students could do for someone else – especially the employer.

What are neglected are the wider public good contributions of higher education and the whole-person development of students. The public good is not just an accumulation of individual private goods (Marginson 2018b). Rather, we understand it as contributions to the common social resources not confined to single individuals, while impacting the lives of many (Marginson and Yang 2022). Through educating students, higher education not only contributes to individual private goods but also to relational collective goods such as social cohesion and stability. As the ideas of Bildung and Confucian self-cultivation suggest, the formation of students could add up to the preparation of future citizens who see themselves as constructive contributors to society, reflecting an important public good outcome of higher education. However, higher education’s longstanding commitment to the public good is now attenuated with the overwhelming focus on the pecuniary returns of a student’s receiving a higher education. With the neoliberal influence worldwide, students are often referred to as ‘consumers’ (Raaper 2019). The competition mindset is not only manifested in the fierce competition and limited resources between higher education institutions but also in students’ pursuit for high grades and positional awards. Whether students have improved their capacity for critical thinking, reflection and reasoning and have demonstrated care and commitment to the wider society is secondary in this way of thinking. It is therefore fair to ask whether, following the other-formation idea and coupled with the sweeping influence of neoliberalism, students ultimately learn to develop themselves for the purposes of others, in particular employers (McArthur 2022).

From this viewpoint, students’ potential in determining their own formation and bringing changes to society is overlooked. While there is a common trope that higher education aims to prepare responsible citizens for society, the de facto practices suggest that higher education has become a site mainly for professional preparation (Spero 2022). For example, there is a lack of attention to the cultivation of students’ public spiritedness and citizenship education (Yang 2022). Reducing the potential of students to instrumental values has caused problems. Wheelahan, Moodie, and Doughney (2022, 1) point out that the pervasive focus on skills in higher education has led to the ‘fetishisation of skills’, which further ‘degrades education, work and social life’. The role of assessment in these processes warrants further investigation.

Assessment and student other-formation

Our argument is that assessment is fundamentally grounded in the idea of student other-formation. This is not to be understood in deterministic means – that assessment would somehow determine students’ identities – but instead, assessment provides a powerful social structure for student agency over their identity development to occur or diminish (Archer 2003). In the following sections, we rely on literature from relevant fields to elaborate on our argument.

The ordering function of assessment

First and foremost, assessment has an ordering function as it allocates students within the various roles and tiers of society. This function of assessment is perhaps more visible at lower levels of education where high-stakes assessment systems quite explicitly widen and restrict students’ life opportunities (Au 2022). In higher education, assessment is often more ‘low-stakes’ in terms of how much individual assessment situations influence students’ future trajectories and prospects. Even then, students’ formation in higher education is regulated and controlled by the ordering function of assessment. For example, assessment hurdles may restrict opportunities for students with low grades; programmes and courses may be restricted to ‘top students’; and employers might use Grade Point Average (GPA) as a form of selection. Thus, the ordering function of assessment is an obvious example of student other-formation.

Formation of students as performers: from educational to transactional relationships

Research has vastly discussed the idea that students are formed as ‘customers’ in the marketised higher education systems (e.g., Raaper 2019). Our intention is not to repeat these words but to ponder the specific role of assessment in forming students within such contexts. Here, we extend Macfarlane’s (2016) suggestion that assessment promotes performativity cultures by shifting the main orientation in teaching and learning from education to performance (see also Ball 2012; Charteris et al. 2016). Performance is, by definition, something observable and ideally measurable. Macfarlane (2016) argues that it is assessment, perhaps more than any other teaching and learning activity, that requires students to turn their individual intellectual growth into something that exists in a public space – into something assessable. Performativity cultures are driven by metrics and rankings as ‘means become ends’ when ‘targets and indicators of quality become mistaken for quality itself’ (Biesta 2015, 13). Assessment provides the structure for such performativity cultures from the student point of view as ‘quality’ and ‘academic standards’ are tied to grades, GPA and learning outcomes. To study in higher education is to perform through assessment: ‘Performative expectations have profoundly changed what it means to be a university student.’ (Macfarlane 2016, 851)

Performativity cultures profoundly undermine the agency of students in their own formation. Performativity cultures hold individuals responsible for their own performance (Macfarlane 2016), which may promote ‘the learner-self lens’ in assessment (Charteris et al. 2016, 115) as students focus mainly on their individual performance. There is plenty of evidence of such behaviour in international assessment literature. For example, students may partake in assessment in a strategic way to optimise their prospects (Raaper 2019); they may avoid taking risks in assessment (Lynch and Hennessy 2017); and they may play the ‘game of assessment’ by focusing on numbers and competition over learning and self-determination (Beatty 2004). Through assessment, students may be formed as context-free individuals; neoliberal agents who act for their own self-interest. This could be particularly the case in national contexts where neoliberal policies have a hold on higher education (Raaper 2019).

The formation of students as performers profoundly changes the relationships between ‘the assessee’ and ‘the assessor’. This relationship is transactional in its nature, and ultimately an economic one as assessment directly provides students with prospects such as job opportunities (Beatty 2004; Becker, Geer, and Hughes 1968). Any attempts to promote alternative classroom cultures, such as the ideas of relational pedagogies and pedagogies of care, will ultimately have to deal with the fundamental roles and responsibilities of ‘assessees’ and ‘assessors’. As with any transaction, assessment thrives on currency: grades. ‘The performer’ may aim to maximise its income in assessment, grades – a desirable form of capital that can be used as a market commodity (Lynch and Hennessy 2017; see also Beatty 2004). And, as with any currency, its power relies on measurability and comparability. This brings us to our next section.

Shaping students as objects: governing through numbers

Another profound idea we see central for student other-formation is that assessment provides students with the means to understand themselves as objects instead of subjects. This ‘objectification’ means that in assessment, students mainly take part in practices designed by someone else, for the purposes defined by someone else. This idea is at the heart of the human capital theory. From a societal point of view, objectifying students is an important purpose of assessment. This function is needed to govern the population of future graduates: without it, higher education would be unable to produce future workforce. This view understands assessment mainly through the economic benefits it brings to societies.

The production of quantified data provides the means for objectifying students. While assessment policies differ greatly in various national and institutional contexts, quantified learning data (e.g. grades) is produced in most higher education institutions. This numerical format provides a powerful way of governing populations (Ball 2012; Beer 2016; Mau 2019). Statistics and numbers have a key role in knowing, calculating and steering populations and optimising them for economic purposes. Higher education systems indeed have been called to be defined through numbers, metrics, rankings and comparisons (Peseta, Barrie, and McLean 2017). Students, too, are known by numbers. They are defined by others, through marks, grades and scores, that are predominantly understood as ‘measurement’ that needs to be ideally valid and reliable.

Assessment thus turns students from socially and politically situated agents into numbered objects that can be compared, sorted and governed. This objectification sets the tone for student other-formation, since through assessment, students are known through numbers. Students can rarely have their say on what these numbers consist of, how they are produced, and what is ultimately done with them. This is why the quantifying element makes assessment a particularly powerful way to shape students from afar: it gives assessment a totalising power (Ball 2012).

Grades as building blocks of student formation

One type of learning data requires special attention when it comes to student formation: grades. We situate numerical grades within the wider context of metric societies where people build their understanding of themselves through quantified data (Beer 2016; Mau 2019). However, not all numerical data are equally powerful from the viewpoint of formation. We argue that grades have more totalising power than many other forms of quantified data given their real power in defining students’ lives, identities and futures. Grades provide the ‘building blocks’ for student formation: they do not determine students’ identities but provide totalising knowledge that is powerful in shaping students. Tannock discusses the role of grading for student formation in public higher education:

Calls to abolish grading (…) are liable to be labelled as radical and unrealistic. If, however, there is to be a serious effort to develop a model of the public university that is oriented to developing critical, independent, self-motivated, democratic thinkers, then what decades of educational theory, research and practice seem to suggest is that, actually, what might be more unrealistic is the expectation that higher education, with its current forms of graded assessment (among other problems), is going to be able to effectively support such a vision. (Tannock 2017, 1352; our emphasis)

Earlier critical data studies have mostly focused on the governmentality of large-scale measurements of learning and development (Beer 2016). Grades in higher education are different types of numbers. They are crafted by teachers: they barely hold any real statistical value. To ensure comparability for economic purposes, higher education relies on an illusion of objectivity through practices such as double-marking. Grades clearly belong to another universe than ‘real’ quantitative instruments with proper psychometric attributes; even then, they provide the means for students to become known through numbers. The illusion of objectivity has been institutionalised in many contexts. For example, the European Bologna Process sought to align course grades in Europe through the formulation of the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS) to standardise student learning outcomes. This is an example of the need to quantify student learning for economic purposes (Dahl, Lien, and Lindberg-Sand 2009). At the same time, this ‘illusion of objectivity’ with respect to the ECTS system may open up avenues for pan-European identity construction due to the mobility it enables. The standardised grades may thus also hold formation functions beyond their economic function.

Despite being crafted, grades have been suggested to dominate students’ identity formation in higher education (e.g. Becker, Geer, and Hughes 1968; Lynch and Hennessy 2017). However, empirical research in this area is scarce. Students might need grades, as they are socialised for understanding themselves through numerical data in educational settings. Without grades, students may feel a ‘loss of an important part of their individual identity’ (Kjærgaard, Mikkelsen, and Buhl-Wiggers 2022, 14). Without numbers, ‘the graded self’ might feel helpless and without a sense of purpose.

Individualisation of students: disconnecting students from the world around them

An underlying presumption regarding assessment is that it addressed the knowledge, skills and competencies of individual students. Here, we refer to Beck and Beck-Gernsheim's (2002) concept of individualisation as a macro-sociological phenomenon through which societal institutions steer people towards understanding themself as individuals, through individualistic ideologies. Our current understanding of assessment is indeed rooted in individualisation. This sets the tone for student other-formation. As Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2002) put it, higher education provides ‘individual credentials leading to individualized career opportunities in the labour market.’ (32) While this might sound obvious, herein lies the fundamental tension between the communal purpose of higher education in providing wider public and communal good and the individualising nature of assessment (Boud and Bearman 2022).

Individualisation is a fundamental social mechanism through which students are shaped. Following Beck and Beck-Gernsheim's (2002) conceptualisation, assessment provides an institutionalised way of individualising students. This other-formation teaches students to understand themselves first and foremost as individuals, yet only through assessment that is designed by others, for the economic purposes set by someone else. Such individualisation is totalising in the sense that it is not easy for students to resist it, given that it is tied to every aspect of higher education as an institution. Students often have little power over the very individualistic purposes of assessment policies and practices (Deeley and Bovill 2017).

Individualism can denote various cultural ideas and is not necessarily neoliberal in its nature. Even then, we note that individualisation, as characterised by Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2002) strengthens the conceptual boundaries between ‘the self’ and ‘others’ and in this way may provide barriers for self-formation to occur. Yet, when it comes to assessment, there is evidence that assessment disconnects students from the wider society around them. For example, McArthur et al. (2022) showed how assessment oriented students towards their own learning goals and employability and diminished students’ orientation to society.

Assessment as a way of socialising students to academia

Other-formation cannot be entirely seen as a neoliberal paradigm, although the two are often coupled with each other. To a large extent, neoliberalism has facilitated the reduction of student (other-)formation to merely skills acquisition and the reduction of students to human capital. However, student other-formation is more than that. Among the three functions of education proposed by Biesta (2015) – qualification, subjectification and socialisation – student other-formation could make important contributions to the functions of socialisation. Other-formation is thus not to be understood as something avoidable. Higher education is always about shaping students by socialising them into academic values, cultures and norms: ‘(…) through education, we become members of and part of particular social, cultural and political ‘orders.’ (Biesta 2015, 40) Assessment plays its part in socialising students to the values and cultures of academia. Taking part in assessment may teach, for example, diligence, grit and critical reflection (Saltmarsh and Saltmarsh 2008). These personal attributes could also play essential roles in students’ lifelong self-formation (see also Yang 2022). At the same time, assessment may also socialise students to academic values such as performativity and competition. Future research needs to carefully unpack the connections between student formation and socialisation in assessment.

Student self-formation

Self-formation of students underlines students’ active role and agency in their own (trans)formation in and through higher education. The self-formation idea has a long tradition in higher education in many philosophies (Marginson 2018a; Yang 2022) and we argue that, compared to the other-formation idea, it better embodies the humanistic essence and purpose of education in terms of enabling ‘whole-person’ education and for the public good. This idea calls for rethinking assessment as a tool for students’ reflexivity and becoming in higher education.

The idea of self-formation has conceptual roots in multiple philosophies including the German Bildung idea, British liberal education idea and Chinese Confucian xiushen (self-cultivation) idea. Although these various philosophical ideas are not identical regarding their worldviews and processes of individual self-formation, they share a common ground that it is the individuals themselves who initiate and lead their formation and transformation (Yang 2022). A fundamental argument here is that individuals are not passive recipients of external resources and constraints. Rather, they have reflexive agency, which enables them to actively navigate the external environment in making their own decisions (Lee 2021). Reflexivity is an important property of human agency According to Archer (2003), human agency can be conceptualised as reflexivity, which confers on individuals internal and subjective powers in actively navigating and interacting with the environment. It is reflexivity that gives individuals’ inner self the controlling power for their action. In other words, the controlling power of individuals’ formation lies in their inner self, not the external environment. The role of education is not to impose knowledge and skills onto individual students, but to enhance their capacity for becoming whom they want to become.

We have no intention to fully engage with the extensive discussion on how to understand ‘other’ and ‘self’ (see e.g. Obodaru 2012; Redfearn 2018). In part, there is no universal definition of ‘other’ and ‘self’, as their connotations and the relationship between them are culturally bounded. The Anglo-Saxon idealistic approach sees the self and other as a duality that is in constant tension and conflict. An important purpose of an individual’s self-formation is to mitigate such tensions and conflicts. Differently, Chinese Confucian approach sees a harmonious relationship between the self and the community (‘other’ is not used because this approach does not understand other as non-self/non-I). ‘Self’ can have multiple facets too. For example, Redfearn (2018) argues that there are many ‘selves’. Higher education literature has understandably focused on professional identities over personal identities (e.g. Trede, Macklin, and Bridges 2012). Yet, the pair of student other-formation and self-formation is not about the dichotomy of I/other. It is neither the question of whether to form for the other or for the self. Rather, other- and self-formation vary in terms of their understanding of an individual’s formation because of their different assumptions on whether individuals have active agency and whether individuals are the major subject in their formation.

In recent years, there has been a growing attention from higher education researchers to the self-formation idea (e.g. Lee 2021; Marginson 2018a). The contemporary discussion of student self-formation was largely stimulated by the paper titled Student self-formation in international education (Marginson 2014). In this paper, Marginson (2014) claimed that higher education is ‘a process of [student] self-formation within conditions of disequilibrium in which student subjects manage their lives reflexively, fashioning their own changing identities, albeit under social circumstances largely beyond their control’ (6). Later, Marginson (2018a) further conceptualises the notion of higher education as student self-formation and argues that ‘higher education is a reflexive process of [student] self-formation and establishes, or deepens, ongoing self-making, grounded in self-aware agency that continues through life’ (2).

The self-formation idea embodies two essential elements (Lee 2021; Marginson 2018a). The first is the rather free space for students to navigate within and beyond universities. Higher education is the stage where many students leave their families and local communities for the first time in their life. The rather flexible curricular in universities and long vacations designed for internships are ideal spaces for students to identify their own interests and explore, through which their agency becomes further enhanced. The second element is students’ extensive, deep, and critical engagement with knowledge (Ashwin 2020; Nieminen and Lahdenperä 2021). This engagement is not about ‘receiving’ knowledge, but about involving in critically assessing and creating knowledge through, for example, seminars and research projects. At the end of higher education, students are not seen as ‘products’ of higher education, being measured based on their usefulness to the labour market. Rather, it is students’ all-round development that becomes a key mission of higher education.

It is worth noting that making students the subject of their own (trans)formation is not to isolate them from the environment, nor to view their (trans)formation as a purely individualistic process. An essential part of the ‘all-round’ development is related to the ‘public’ aspect of individual formation. As Yang (2022) points out, the self-formation ideas in multiple philosophies and cultures share the emphasis on the cultivation of moral qualities and public spiritedness of individuals. For example, with careful design and organisation, students’ self-formation in higher education could harness their responsibility to contribute to the good of the collective spheres. As such, higher education could contribute to students’ lifelong learning and to the wider public good in societies.

Assessment as a tool for reflexivity

In this section, we ask whether, and how, assessment could provide students with agency in relation to their own formation in contexts where the current practices of assessment are firmly grounded in the idea of student other-formation. The section is divided into two parts. The first part outlines how assessment could provide the means for student self-formation within the current landscapes of higher education. The second part reimagines the role of assessment within such landscapes.

Bolt-holes, breathing spaces and counter-spaces

Due to political and economic reasons, it may be that assessment continues its function of ‘other-forming’ students in higher education. Might there still be room for seeing assessment as something that could promote student self-formation through agency and reflexivity? This would require seeing every assessment situation as an opportunity for agentic negotiation of one’s professional identity. To answer this question, we rely on Webb’s (2018) idea of bolt-holes and breathing spaces. Webb (2018) argues that in marketised higher education, systemic and sustainable changes may not be possible, yet there is always a possibility for ‘small-scale experiences of utopian possibility’ (99). Webb elaborates on the need for carving out bolt-holes and breathing spaces from the overarching values of marketisation and competition; we discuss these bolt-holes from the specific viewpoint of student formation. We propose four theory-bound ideas for nurturing students’ self-reflexivity.

Perhaps the most straightforward way to provide breathing spaces for self-formation is to remove assessment. Of course, removing assessment (or grades) is not possible in many national and institutional contexts. Even then, assessment-free bolt-holes might be created within individual courses or programmes. This suggestion relies on the idea that unhelpful and potentially harmful elements for student formation should be done away with. In practice, such removal has been conducted by, for example, removing grades from learning (Kjærgaard, Mikkelsen, and Buhl-Wiggers 2022; McMorran and Ragupathi 2020). The ‘ungrading’ movement refers to teachers’ refusal to offer grades, and to teachers’ creative usage of grading scales to render grades meaningless (e.g. by grading all students with A+; Blum 2020). The possibilities of ungrading and other similar resistance practices for student formation are still, however, largely undiscovered. Another numbering practice that might be removed are exams. We do not criticise closed-book exams per se but note that they too provide quantified data for student formation – and should thus be considered from an ethical point of view (Nieminen and Lahdenperä 2021). Assessment-less breathing spaces could include built-in, designed elements of informal assessment that allow spontaneous and elicited feedback moments to occur (see Jensen, Bearman, and Boud 2022). For example, a teacher might allocate one lecture completely for free-form conversations around student work, perhaps by making use of some structures for assessment to facilitate the development of reflexivity (e.g. by basing the discussion on assessment criteria). Such spaces might enable students to breathe and build their reflexivity.

Of course, removing assessment often leads to many unintended problems. Thus, assessment for student self-formation may need to complement the prevalent structures of assessment, such as institutional grading policies. For example, it is not possible to remove grades in many contexts; in others, exams cannot be contested; and the removal of numerical assessment data may deny students opportunities in future job markets. In assessment, bolt-holes and breathing spaces might be designed into courses by enabling students space to explore, grow and self-form. Instead of competitive, individualistic tasks, assessment might build upon collective approaches that recognise trust and collaboration as central values (Boud and Bearman 2022). Peer feedback practices have been shown to foster the development of learning communities, both in physical and digital learning environments (Wood 2022). As Wood (2022) discusses, dialogic feedback conversations through screencast technologies do not only foster learning but enable students to develop social relationships; similar argument might be made for developing reflexivity through being exposed to multiple viewpoints and solutions. Sometimes, such communal breathing spaces are needed to protect students from assessment: to enable spaces free of stress, anxiety and competition. In such spaces, students may gain more agency in relation to their own formation.

Thirdly, assessment might explicitly challenge the prevalent mechanisms of other-formation. Assessment could be conducted through critical-transformative means to provide counter-spaces in which student reflexivity can be nurtured (Nieminen 2021). Such counter-spaces may contest the structures of assessment without completely diminishing them. From the viewpoint of student self-formation, counter-spaces refer to any critical assessment practices that value students’ agentic negotiation of their own formation. To provide an example, student partnership offers an intriguing way to design counter-spaces in assessment by contesting the commonly held ideas about ‘who transforms whom’ in assessment (Deeley and Bovill 2017). Students may partner in assessment design by co-constructing rubrics, assessment practices, feedback practices and grading criteria (Quesada et al. 2019). All these activities, whether implemented on a small classroom scale or more systematically at a programme or policy level, offer students opportunities to design those methods that often define their professional identities from afar, thus gaining power over their own formation.

Fourthly, we note the potential of explicitly developing students’ critical data literacies in terms of how they use assessment data to transform themselves (Nieminen, Bearman, and Ajjawi 2022). Brand and Sander (2020) define critical data literacy as ‘the ability to critically engage with datafication by reflecting on the societal implications of data processing and implementing this understanding in practice’ (2). When assessment is placed within their context of data societies (Mau 2019), it is now possible to think about critical data literacy in this specific context as students’ ability to understand the societal implications of why and how assessment data is collected. Training students on how to use both digital and non-digital assessment data critically and reflexively as ‘building blocks’ of their professional identities provides an intriguing future trajectory for research on student formation (see Beer 2016). This way, grades or test scores would not simply ‘other-form’ students, but students would have more agency over how assessment data shapes them as students.

Assessment for becoming

Tinkering around the edges of assessment may not be enough to harness assessment as a mechanism for student self-formation. If higher education aims to promote ideals and values such as Bildung and xiushen (Yang 2022), it needs to radically rethink why and how assessment is conducted. As Webb (2018) puts it, spaces for revolutionary classrooms are shrinking: ‘The utopian classroom may offer refuge and respite but something more is needed.’ (102) This may be particularly so when it comes to assessment. On a large scale, reimagining assessment would require higher education institutions to take a role in resisting the human capital models by aligning their assessment practices with the stated purposes of higher education. Such work should start from assessment, given that assessment provides an established institutional framework for students to know themselves through (Becker, Geer, and Hughes 1968).

What might assessment look like if it was designed from ground up to support students’ personal growth as future professionals and citizens? Assessment, then, would be designed not to measure and rank but to promote students’ transformational relationships with knowledge, teachers and other students. This is what we call assessment for becoming.

First, despite its name, self-formation never develops in a vacuum but always in interaction between the ‘self’, higher education and society. The very starting point for promoting student self-formation in assessment begins by making sure assessment reaches beyond the individual. We echo Boud and Bearman’s (2022) words in that ‘assessment for becoming’ may reach beyond the individual and towards the communal: ‘Normalising the collaborative [in assessment] is a fundamental shift and involves some radical rethinking as to the foundational tenets of higher education.’ (Boud and Bearman 2022, 4) This calls for systemic redesign for collaboration, as well as for free space for informal assessment and feedback encounters to occur.

Student partnership in assessment may promote student self-formation on a wider systemic level, too. Assessment is at the heart of human capital models through the ranking and comparison it enables; challenging these systems profoundly by enabling students to shape the assessment structures that in turn shape students is central for student self-formation. Assessment practice could learn from the vast literature on student voice in higher education (e.g. Deeley and Bovill 2017; Sun et al. 2011). Importantly, students should not only be seen as the co-designers of assessment practices but purposes and policies as well: why is assessment conducted? We welcome systemic assessment design initiatives that see students as change agents over assessment, placing the agency and initiative to rethink assessment within the students’ domain (Peseta et al. 2016). Such approaches would see assessment as a thoroughly communal endeavour between students and academic staff: the artificial binaries of Self/Other and assessee/assessor would be contested, if not locally diminished (Obodaru 2012; Redfearn 2018). This way, assessment could fit into Archer’s (2003) conceptualisation of reflexivity as something that gives individuals controlling power over their own formation. We place particular importance on re-negotiating numerical marks and grades. We understand that beyond our imagination, such large-scale initiatives for student partnership in assessment are unlikely to occur. Students themselves might hold onto the individualistic values that assessment and grading provide. In reality, student voice in assessment might be restricted to ‘bolt-hole approaches’; or at least partnership initiatives would carefully need to juggle between the democratic and neoliberal values of assessment (Deeley and Bovill 2017; Peseta et al. 2016). Even then, we see that assessment partnership is one of the clearest ways in providing students power over their own formation.

Communal approaches may reach beyond classrooms and academic institutions, aligning student formation with the wider public good that higher education produces. Here, Jan McArthur’s work on the connection between assessment, society and social justice offers an excellent starting point. McArthur notes that ‘authentic assessment’, which deals with real-life issues, is not about ‘joining an existing world out there but of being part of the transformation of that world’, pushing ‘the possibilities of what the world could be’ (McArthur 2022, 12). We extend this argumentation by noting that assessment that connects with society transforms students. As students deal with assessment tasks that transform the world, such as by organising anti-racist social media campaigns, coding software to lessen environmental damage, or designing educational practices to teach children about social injustice, they necessarily address the ethical dimensions of assessment. However, such self-formation might not occur if students are not offered meaningful experiences of interacting with the world and transforming it. Writing an essay about sustainability might tinker around the edges of ‘assessment for social justice’, but such a task is very different to one that asks students to promote sustainability in practice. We note the novel opportunities that digital technologies bring to such communal work. Digitally-mediated assessment may offer possibilities for students to transform themselves through the digital world we live in (Nieminen, Bearman, and Ajjawi 2022).

Student formation is always a temporal process. This means that ‘assessment for becoming’ does not only connect students with others in the given time but in the past and future. However, assessment is rarely built upon longitudinal approaches, but teachers commonly design assessment only for the purposes of individual courses or units. This is why we see particular value for student self-formation in programmatic assessment that provides students opportunities to form themselves not only in relation to course learning outcomes, but in relation to programme learning outcomes as well (Schuwirth and Van der Vleuten 2011). Each individual assessment encounter is then seen as a data point that reflects students’ development in terms of their growth within a given programme. As Swan Sein et al. (2021) note, programmatic assessment offers affordances for supporting both student learning and the development of their professional identity development. We extend this argument further by noting that programmatic assessment could make transparent the processes of other- and self-formation in assessment encounters. Every assessment encounter, whether formal or informal, could be carefully linked with predetermined assessment criteria; and the overall programmatic structure of assessment could leave space for students to reflect upon these encounters and to build their reflexivity. Students might be asked, for example, to revisit influential ‘data points’ from their earlier years to self-reflect their learning and identity construction over time. Careful co-design of programmatic assessment with students provides intriguing future opportunities for student self-formation, particularly from the viewpoint of balancing self- and other-formation. Indeed, longitudinal approaches to assessment acknowledge students’ assessment histories and identities that they built since they have entered the educational system. Assessment in higher education might offer students tools to critically examine and contest these earlier assessment identities.

Final words

In this study, we have theorised student formation in and through assessment. Our work sets an agenda of approaching assessment as a matter of being and becoming. Arguably, all assessment shapes students; our study provides some starting points for unpacking these processes. We call for empirical studies to examine how students are constructed through assessment in different higher education contexts. We find it particularly important to examine how assessment practices and policies could harmonise other- and self-formation. How to shape students from afar while also providing them with the means to reflexively shape themselves? We emphasise that this is a contextual question, not a universal one. This kind of work could empirically test whether, and how, assessment could be harnessed for the purpose of self-formation in higher education settings that are often grounded in the idea of other-formation. Given the profound role assessment plays in shaping students in higher education, we believe it is important and timely to pay increasing attention to how students could be positioned as major subjects in their own formation in assessment.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

Publication was made possible in part by support from the HKU Libraries Open Access Author Fund sponsored by the HKU Libraries.