When Assessment Goes Digital

Abstract

This thesis addresses the digitalisation of higher education from a sociocultural perspective and investigates how teachers’ understandings and context enable and shape digital assessment practices. The research questions are: How do teachers understand teaching and learning in digital environments, with particular focus on assessment practices? What discourses about digital assessment practices can be found? What obstacles and opportunities do these discourses entail? Through interviews with teachers at two technical universities and an analysis of meeting minutes from a teaching policy board comprising educational leaders, the study examines understandings of digital assessmnets contextual factors. The thesis approaches these questions from two methodological standpoints, phenomenography and discourse analysis, which, together, enable the exploration of both teachers’ understandings of digital assessment enactment and the socially constructed conditions that shape these practices. The findings demonstrate that a student-centred approach is associated with a greater willingness to reconsider established practices in the light of digitalisation. This includes viewing assessment as a part of students’ learning. The educational potential of digital technology depends less on teachers’ technical competence, and more on their orientation towards student learning. At the same time, the analysis of meeting minutes identifies discourses that foreground efficiency, quality assurance, control, and process development. This suggests that digitalisation may strengthen instrumental governance of education, which, in turn, undermines teachers’ professional practice. The analysis shows that the digitalisation of assessment can be understood in terms of tensions between different orientations and views on the digitalisation of higher education: as an opportunity to reflect on and develop pedagogical practices, or as a means of shaping and thereby streamlining processes. If digitalisation is to support educational development in ways that genuinely promote student learning, teachers must be given space and support to reflect on and develop assessment practices aligned to disciplinary and pedagogical needs, rather than being subjected to increasingly detailed regulation of educational processes. 

Link to DiVA