Assessment of independent learning: perception and realization

Abstract

The mission of university education nowadays is not only concerned with nurturing experts of various professions, but also cultivating life-long learners, among others. Independent learning and pedagogies with the aim to foster learner autonomy have gained growing importance over the last decade. However, whether and how independent learning can be assessed has not been fully addressed in the literature. The difficulty and challenge lies in the fact that independent learning is such an elusive construct which can “manifest itself in many different ways” (Little, 1991, p. 4). The first part of the presentation aims to understand language teachers’ perceptions of the assessment of independent learning. The study was comprised of nine hours of spoken narratives generated by the interviews with 22 teachers who had had experience in assessing and/or developing assessment criteria for independent learning. A key aspect of the study was to understand what evidence the teachers considered to be crucial to successful independent learning. The second part reports the findings from another study which gauged the success of the independent learning component of an English for Specific Purposes (ESP) course through the corpus-informed discourse analysis of written narrative data completed by more than 400 first-year engineering students, totaling about 0.55 million words. Students of the ESP course had to take part in independent learning twice during a 12-week course and were required to reflect on their learning experience. It is proposed that by tracing the changes in their reflective writing, the effectiveness of independent learning can be indirectly gauged.