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Towards a Situated View of Assessment Literacy for Higher Education

Date

2022-08-18

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

ORCID

0000-0001-9329-763X

Type

Thesis

Degree Level

Masters

Abstract

The guiding purpose of this study was to explore how the term assessment literacy (AL) could be differently constructed in higher education (HE) settings as opposed to how it has been constructed for other settings. First, an empirical scoping review of 182 sources revealed AL for HE as more sophisticated than described with current AL models. Emergent themes of the scoping review were compared to existing AL conceptualizations and discussed with consideration to prior AL research. Using the scoping review results as a theoretical framework, a survey was developed to investigate how common assessment tasks in HE settings could be organized and labelled, and how such tasks may differently invoke speculated components of AL for HE. The thesis reports on survey development, item pool review, and various statistical analyses of data from a limited convenience sample of faculty from a Western Canadian HE institution. Survey findings revealed that assessment is implicated in a range of HE tasks that seem separable and which have not been considered in previous literature regarding AL. Further, different HE tasks were associated with varying strength to different arrangements of components of AL. As well, components of AL that were speculated from thematic analysis of a body of literature related to AL in HE were correlated to one another in various ways. Together, these findings indicated that AL may be explained by examining composite sub-concepts in relation to one another, and further that such a model for AL is related to different tasks in different ways. This underscores the idea that particular purposes for assessment in HE may be nested within a more general conceptualization of AL. Limitations and directions for future work on conceptualizing AL for HE are also discussed.

Description

Keywords

assessment, assessment literacy, higher education, scoping review, survey study, mixed methods, factor analysis, thematic analysis

Citation

Degree

Master of Education (M.Ed.)

Department

Educational Psychology and Special Education

Program

Educational Psychology and Special Education

Advisor

Part Of

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DOI

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