In higher education, students often complete an assessment, submit it, receive a grade, and then move on. Academics evaluate and mark the work, offer feedback, and focus on the next task. The assessment has effectively fulfilled its purpose: generating evidence, informing judgments, and contributing to the final results.
But has it actually contributed to the student’s future learning?
This is the question at the centre of learning-oriented assessment. Rather than seeing assessment primarily as a way of measuring what students have already learned, learning-oriented assessment asks how the assessment process itself helps students learn. It shifts attention from the result of the task towards what students develop by completing it, interpreting feedback and making decisions about what they need to do next.
This distinction matters as assessment has an enormous influence on student behaviour. It signals what is important, where students should direct their effort and what kinds of learning will be valued. Yet despite this influence, assessment is still frequently positioned as something that happens after learning, rather than as part of learning.
For academics, a broader question should be: are our assessment systems designed primarily to produce grades, or to develop more capable, reflective, and independent learners?
Readers familiar with my previous pieces will know I have concerns about the role grades play in higher education, particularly the precision and authority often attributed to them. However, this is not the main point here. Even in a system that uses grades, a key question remains: does assessment merely produce a result, or does it also enhance students’ ability to learn, judge quality, and tackle future challenges?
Moving Beyond Assessment of and for Learning
Discussions about assessment often distinguish between summative assessment, which is assessment of learning, and formative assessment, which is assessment for learning. This distinction can be useful, but it can also be too simplistic.
A summative assessment can contribute to future learning when students have opportunities to interpret and apply what it reveals. A formative activity can have little learning value when students complete it mechanically, receive comments they do not understand or have no opportunity to use.
One approach is learning-oriented assessment, which moves beyond the label attached to the assessment task. It asks what students and educators do with the evidence and feedback generated by assessment. It positions students as active participants who monitor their development, evaluate the quality of their work, and use assessment information to guide what happens next.
In this sense, learning-oriented assessment is closely connected to assessment as learning. Assessment is not treated as a separate event that occurs after teaching and learning have finished. It becomes one of the ways students develop knowledge, practise judgement and learn to respond to evidence about their performance.
The challenge is therefore not simply to introduce more formative quizzes, remove examinations or increase the amount of feedback academics provide. It is to design assessment so that every part of the process has a learning purpose.
An Assessment Task Should Also Be a Learning Task
An assessment can be valid, aligned with the learning outcomes, and supported by a detailed rubric, yet still contribute very little to future learning. Students may produce a strong piece of work, but the capabilities required to complete it may never be revisited. They may receive extensive feedback, but the course may provide no meaningful opportunity to apply it.
Learning-oriented assessment asks us to treat assessment tasks as learning tasks. The work students complete should help them develop knowledge, capabilities and ways of thinking that extend beyond the immediate submission. They should be doing more than producing evidence for an academic to judge.
This doesn’t not mean every assessment must mimic a workplace activity or produce a polished professional product. Instead, it means the intellectual effort involved in completing the task should be meaningful. Students may need to interpret evidence, make decisions, test methods, justify their choices, revise their thinking, or communicate their understanding to a specific audience.
The question is not only “Does this task measure the learning outcome?”, but also “What will students be better able to do because they completed it?”
This question can reveal a weakness in many assessment systems. We can sometimes design excellent individual tasks but pay less attention to the learning journey created by the collection of assessments across a unit, or even a student’s entire course. Students may be asked to write several essays, deliver multiple presentations or complete repeated case studies, without necessarily encountering greater complexity, independence or responsibility. Whilst the task may change, the learning remains at the same level.
Students Must Participate in Judging Quality
Traditional assessment often places the academic as the authority on quality, with the student simply waiting to learn if they have met the standards. The academic creates the task, sets the criteria, evaluates the evidence, and delivers the final judgment.
Students might know their grade but not the reasons behind it. They could read feedback without recognising their common strengths or weaknesses in future tasks. They might pass university assessments but still rely on others to evaluate the quality of their work.
Learning-oriented assessment challenges this reliance by providing students with chances to enhance their ability to identify quality, assess their progress, and understand what constitutes improvement. This may include analysing sample work, applying criteria, comparing different responses, reflecting on their own work, or explaining their decision-making process.
David Carless’s work on learning-oriented assessment brings together three connected elements: assessment tasks that promote learning, the development of students’ evaluative expertise and feedback processes that students actively use. Together, these elements shift assessment from something performed on students towards a process in which students participate.
This does not eliminate the importance of academic judgment. Academic standards continue to be significant, and educators are still tasked with making defensible decisions about student achievement. Nonetheless, that judgment should also support students in developing their ability to make more informed decisions independently.
After graduation, there may be no rubric, marker or detailed written feedback. Graduates will need to recognise whether their work meets expectations, identify what is missing and decide how to improve it. Assessment should help them practise this before they graduate.
Feedback Needs Somewhere to Go
Universities frequently focus on improving the speed, detail and consistency of feedback. These efforts are valuable, but they can overlook a more fundamental problem. Giving the students an opportunity to apply the feedback they receive.
Assessment feedback commonly arrives after an assessment task has finished. Students may not complete a similar task again within the same unit, and the next assessment may require an entirely different form of performance. As a result, even thoughtful feedback can become commentary on a closed event, rather than guidance that contributes to the student’s continuing development. Ideally, feedback would remain visible across the student’s learning journey, allowing students to revisit earlier advice when it becomes relevant and enabling educators to understand the feedback students have received in previous units. This would position feedback not as something attached only to an individual task, but as part of a developing record of learning that both students and educators can draw on over time.
Some of these concerns can be resolved through learning-oriented assessment, which requires feedback loops to be closed. Students need to act on the information. They might revise part of their work, identify how feedback will shape their next task, compare their judgement with the academic’s judgement, or demonstrate how they have responded in a later assessment. The important shift is from feedback being delivered to feedback being used.
This also changes how we think about feedback quality. A page of detailed comments is not necessarily more valuable than three focused observations that students understand and apply. The effectiveness of feedback cannot be judged solely by what the academic provides. It must also be judged by what the student can do with it.
Academic Leadership Must Look Across the Course
Individual academics can introduce learning-oriented practices within their units, but the approach’s full potential requires course-level coordination.
Students cannot apply feedforward feedback when assessment tasks are disconnected. They cannot develop evaluative judgement progressively when each unit assumes another has already taught it. They cannot build independence when each assessment returns them to the same level.
Educators therefore need to look beyond whether individual assessments are compliant, appropriately weighted and aligned with unit learning outcomes. They need to examine the assessment experience across the course.
Where are students introduced to important capabilities? Where do they practise them? When are they expected to demonstrate greater independence? Where can feedback from one task inform performance in another? Which assessments invite students to judge quality, and which position them only as recipients of judgement?
This does not require every unit to use identical assessments. Nor should it remove educator autonomy. It requires a shared understanding of what the assessment journey is trying to develop.
Educators also need to ensure that course teams have the time and structures required to hold these conversations. Assessment mapping cannot be reduced to listing task types and due dates. It needs to examine the capabilities students are developing, the relationships between tasks, and how assessment becomes progressively more complex across a course.
An assessment system should do more than confirm that students have passed a sequence of units. It should leave them progressively better prepared to manage unfamiliar problems, evaluate their own work and continue learning beyond the course.
A grade tells us something about what a student demonstrated at a single point in time. Learning-oriented assessment asks what that moment makes possible next.
Questions for Reflection
- Are assessment tasks in your courses designed as worthwhile learning experiences, or primarily as opportunities to earn grades?
- Where are students explicitly supported in developing their own judgement about quality?
- What opportunities do students have to apply feedback from one assessment to another?
- Do assessment tasks become more complex and independent as students progress through the course?
- Do your academic quality processes examine the coherence of the complete assessment journey, or mainly the compliance of assessment?
