This week began with a perusal of Allan Davies’ Learning outcomes and assessment criteria in art and design. What’s the recurring problem? Network, Issue 18: July 2012. I had to look up the references to Bloom’s 1956 Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The Classification of Educational Goals in order to understand the thesis of Davies’ argument.

I broadly agree with the necessity to standardize assessment criteria to ensure a fair system of grading. This is especially nuanced in the creative arts, as some of the received wisdom of what is ‘good’, can be in danger of depending on subjective opinions. Style or fashion can be very culture specific and to critique something, it is important to have an understanding of the context in which it is being presented. The student must believe that their teacher understands their context. The objectivity of the teacher is important to ensure trust in the fairness of assessing creativity.

Bloom’s taxonomies of prescriptive language may be difficult to apply to the particular nuances of the creative arts. Davies, instead, presents a model of deliberate ambiguity; having some over-arching structure to the learning outcomes while leaving space to explore divergent pathways.

‘So, I suggest, in art and design whilst it is important that students know what they have to do on any course of study, it is not necessarily through published learning outcomes. Learning outcomes might be seen as necessary for administrative purposes but they are not sufficient in helping students develop an idea of what they will be learning and how they will go about it. Indeed, in a highly supportive context, learning outcomes might be so generalised as to only define the landscape and the boundaries of their intended learning. The knowing of what to do becomes developmental and personalised.’

Identifying and refining keywords and outcome descriptors can paradoxically lead to confusion and a sense of meaninglessness in the brief.

Rather than measurability, the focus should be on meaningfulness

Art and Design uses the process of iteration to research, develop, review, synthesize and repeat, over and over until a successful conclusion is reached. Assessment needs to accommodate this process.

Unless a teacher has been party to the design and development of a programme, he or she will not necessarily understand how what they are expected to do fits into the whole. Programme design in such a complex landscape is often a negotiation of the language that embraces it. Only the course designers have a real understanding of how things fit together.

As a Technician, I am not party to the assessment criteria and this affects my ability to advise students. Even when I have read the Learning Objectives for the course module, which we are not routinely given access to, they can be (following Davies’ suggestion) deliberately ambiguous. So I have to make certain judgements about what I feel is important, when I am teaching students, and then cross my fingers and hope that the course teams would agree with me. Which in most cases, they would. But in those circumstances where there is doubt, I usually frame this to students in terms of the different choices they can make and the reasons they might have for choosing one over the other, and leave it to them to make their own mind up. The student will have been party to the introduction of the Learning Outcomes (LO) in their initial brief for that project, where they should have discussed the LO’s in more detail and so they should be the best judge of what to take from my advice. This becomes part of their ‘research’.

Interrogation: how does this verbal categorization of learning outcomes tied to assessment criteria affect students whose mother tongue is not the language in which it was written. Is there a nuance in the understanding of the descriptors which could be culturally driven and therefore exclusionary to some groups of students?