My immersion into programmatic assessment

I have been reflecting on my first few months as part of the team at Liftupp - thinking about what I've learnt, what I need to learn, what we're good at, what we need to improve at, who likes what we do, who do we need to convince and much more.

A topic I've become extremely interested in is programmatic assessment. This is really the USP of our flagship software, Develop. It's the conceptual foundation of the Liftupp platform, and put simply it's about looking at student performance in multiple (rather than isolated) contexts.

So for example, most people will be familiar with some of the more common isolated spot tests such as essays, or multiple choice exams, or practical tests. But what a programmatic assessment strategy seeks to do is pull all of these individual assessments together in a meaningful way to give a holistic view of competence. When underpinned with longitudinal data it becomes a powerful assessment tool.

It might sound obvious but there's some really sound rationale as to why you might seek to accomplish this. Let's think about learning to drive. I'd do well to caveat this by saying "last time I checked" - there were essentially 3 components to the test. A theory test, a hazard perception test and a practical test. The theory and hazard perception might be rolled into one, but they're two different assessment methods so we'll treat them in that way.

The tests occur in isolation; your practical examiner has no knowledge of your theory test or hazard perception data as the student, there's unlikely to be much regard for how you performed in your theory test or hazard perception when you're on your practical test. The results are surfaced separately. Nobody pulls all assessment results together and says, here's some areas you should focus on.

But what if we looked at the individual domains of driving. You can utilise The Highway Code as a form of curriculum, and map its content to exam questions. Let's say we isolate 'Parking' as a domain and within that domain, 'Parallel Parking' as a skill.

Now, it might be that your theory on parallel parking is sound, you adequately spot any hazards which present themselves and you ace the practical test. But what you don't have is anything that rounds up all of these data points, and allows you to scrutinise that particular skill to evaluate your own competence in these different contexts. Now imagine it's the reason you failed, or at least one of them. Is it obvious that was the reason though? Sure, your practical exam results indicated some minor or major fails for that skill. But are they correlated with the other tests? If you failed by 1 mark on your theory could that have also been the skill at fault?

So, imagine you could look at those individual competencies across multiple contexts and see some common elements of the curriculum - in this case parallel parking - where you don't perform very well in either theory, hazard perception or practically - that's a really good indicator (unintentional pun) as to what you need to focus on not only to pass the test, but fundamentally, to improve your driving and become a more competent road user.

Wouldn't a system that could surface this data be useful? To me, at least from what I've learnt so far, this is the essence of programmatic assessment and it's in the DNA of Liftupp - it's what we aspire to empower HEI's with when we work together on a project and it's something I'm very excited to be learning more about!