Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education

ISSN: 0260-2938 (Print) 1469-297X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/caeh20

Tutors’ assessment practices and students’

situated learning in higher education: chalk and
cheese

Paul Orsmond & Stephen Merry

To cite this article: Paul Orsmond & Stephen Merry (2017) Tutors’ assessment practices and
students’ situated learning in higher education: chalk and cheese, Assessment & Evaluation in
Higher Education, 42:2, 289-303, DOI: 10.1080/02602938.2015.1103366

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2015.1103366

Published online: 28 Oct 2015.

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Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 2017
Vol. 42, No. 2, 289–303, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2015.1103366

Tutors’ assessment practices and students’ situated learning in

higher education: chalk and cheese
Paul Orsmond* and Stephen Merry

Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Staffordshire University, Stoke-on-Trent, UK

This article uses situated learning theory to consider current tutor assessment and
feedback practices in relation to learning practices employed by students outside
the overt curriculum. The case is made that an emphasis on constructive
alignment and explicitly articulating assessment requirements within curricula
may be misplaced. Outside of the overt curriculum students appear to be
interdependent learners, participating in communities of practice and learning
networks, where sense-making occurs through negotiation and there is identity
development. Such negotiation may translate curriculum requirements articulated
by tutors into unexpected meanings. Hence, tutors’ efforts might be better placed
on developing students’ ability to self-assess and to effectively evaluate and
negotiate information, rather than primarily on their own delivery of the
curriculum content and feedback. Tutors cannot be fully effective if they fail to
consider students’ learning outside the overt curriculum, and ways to facilitate
such learning processes are suggested together with future research directions.
Keywords: higher education; situated learning; communities of practice;
assessment

Introduction
While teaching sessions in higher education are undoubtedly important, and have
been the focus of much learning research, they are not the sole location of student
learning at university. This article seeks to show the importance of students’ learning
outside the overt higher education curriculum (Havnes 2008). In so doing, there is
an emphasis on students’ community learning practices, and there is consideration
of the consequences of these student practices in terms of tutor assessment, feedback
and curriculum design.
Specifically, this article endeavours to contribute to the literature on student
learning and assessment in higher education by seeking to use situated learning the-
ory, with specific reference to learning in communities of practice, to: (1) consider
how the use of tutor constructed artefacts such as assessment marking criteria and
feedback may be understood; (2) evaluate the impact of student learning outside the
overt curriculum; and (3) consider the role of negotiated identity development in stu-
dent learning. The analysis is largely theoretical, but illustrative student quotes from
two previously published interview studies are provided, and the implications of the
findings for curriculum design are considered.

*Corresponding author. Email: p.orsmond@staffs.ac.uk

© 2015 Taylor & Francis

290 P. Orsmond and S. Merry

By way of making explicit the difference between tutors’ teaching and learning
practice and students’ situated learning, the English expression as different as chalk
and cheese will be employed. This expression means ‘Two things that are very dif-
ferent from each other’ (http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/chalk-and-cheese.
html), and reflects the very different approaches to learning considered by tutors and
students.

The basis of tutors’ teaching and learning practices: the chalk

In their influential paper, Marton and Säljö (1976) identified two different levels of
processing text, which were dependent on the focus taken by the learner. Learners
that focused on what the text signified took a deep-level processing approach to
learning, while those learners that focused on the text itself, the sign, were consid-
ered to take a surface-level processing approach to learning. The deep/surface meta-
phor describes approaches students may take to particular tasks; it does not describe
the characteristics of students. Thus, in terms of higher education, students are not
in themselves either deep or surface learners, but respond as learners to the learning
environment that tutors create for them. Marton (1981) proceeded to explore
research methodologies to investigate the deep/surface metaphor and other phenom-
ena where qualitative differences exist. Such research was aimed at description,
analysis and understanding of experiences, and was labelled ‘phenomenography’.
Phenomenography, in association with the deep/surface metaphor, has become an
effective methodological approach for both teaching and learning research in higher
education. For example, Trigwell and Prosser (1996), in a phenomenographic study,
suggested that environments that encouraged deeper approaches to learning could
facilitate higher quality learning. The role of the environment was further explored
by Trigwell, Prosser, and Waterhouse (1999), who linked teachers’ conceptions of
teaching and learning with their approach to teaching and students’ deep or surface
approaches to learning.
The other strand of research that has strongly influenced research into teaching
and learning in higher education is constructivism. Social constructivism focuses on
the individual learning which occurs because of social interaction. Biggs (2003, 13)
notes that ‘what people construct from a learning encounter depends on … what
they know already and how they use that prior knowledge … meaning is therefore
personal … what else can it be?’ This rhetorical question is answered in terms of, if
not the individual, the only alternative being ‘meaning is transmitted from teacher to
student’.
It is acknowledged that there have been increased moves to include joint presen-
tations, practical exercises, simulations and other group activities within the overt
higher education curriculum. However, the notion of individual cognitive develop-
ment has been a strong higher education learning research theme. For example,
Entwistle and Marton (1994) considered students’ perceptions of revision material
as knowledge objects. More recently, in terms of feedback practices, Nicol,
Thomson, and Breslin (2014) shifted the emphasis from students’ construction of
meaning from received feedback, to explore the individual learning resulting from
students being feedback producers. Nevertheless, the emphasis remained on the
individual and cognitive processes activated through peer reviewing.
In the present paper, the authors seek to question, not the outcomes or methodol-
ogy of this research, but the narrow focus of interpreting higher education learning
 Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 291

research with undue emphasis on what occurs in the classroom, and with learning as
an individual event. This is perhaps most recognisable through constructive align-
ment, a process that uses constructivist theory and draws on the deep/surface meta-
phor. The principal components of constructive alignment, which are designed to
encourage deep engagement, are outlined by Biggs (2003): (1) the curriculum that
we teach, (2) the teaching methods that we use and (3) the assessment procedures
that we use. An ‘imbalance in the system will lead to poor teaching and surface
learning’ (26). An example of non-alignment would be seen in terms of ‘practices
that contradict what we preach’. Within constructed alignment, ‘students are
entrapped in [a] web of consistency, optimising the likelihood that they will engage
the appropriate learning activities, but paradoxically leaving them free to construct
their knowledge their way’ (27).
The final phase of constructive alignment, assessment, is often seen as the most
powerful student learning tool available to higher education tutors. For example,
Gibbs (1999, 41) discusses how assessment can be used strategically as the most
‘powerful lever teachers have to influence the way students … behave as learners’.
It is noteworthy that assessment within higher education, particularly when high
stakes, is almost exclusively an individual process, and following such assessment
students are given primarily individual feedback designed to enhance their learning
(Poulos and Mahony 2008).
Overall, it would appear that student learning in higher education is often under-
stood in terms of a tutor constructed curriculum, with assessment and feedback facil-
itating cognitive development of the individual learner. Learning is seen in terms of
the deep/surface metaphor within a social constructivist learning theory, although
this may masquerade, particularly in terms of meeting outcomes, as a behaviourist
activity (Torrance 2012).

Theoretical basis of students’ situated learning: the cheese

Situated cognition has been considered in a number of ways. Elsbach, Barr, and
Hargadon (2005, 423) support the notion that ‘cognition exists in the interaction of
perceivers’ minds (schema) and their environment (context … situated cognition is
thinking that is embedded in the context in which it occurs’.
While, for some, situated learning has been considered to be encompassed within
the definition of situated cognition (Durning and Artino 2011), Lave and Wenger
(1991), in a seminal text, considered situated learning as having the defining charac-
teristic of a process, referring to as legitimate peripheral participation. It can refer to
the learning trajectory that newcomers take when joining the periphery of a commu-
nity of learners towards more central engagement. It can also be explained in terms
of ‘everyone’s participation is legitimately peripheral in some respect [as] everyone
can to some degree be considered a newcomer to the future of a changing commu-
nity’ (117). For either consideration, legitimate peripheral participation allows com-
munity participants to talk about activities, identities, artefacts and community
knowledge and practice.
An unjustified criticism of such communities of practice has been that they do
not provide the opportunity for new learning. Lave and Wenger (1991) consider
learning in a community of practice as dynamic, with ‘multiple viewpoints’ (113),
and there is ‘multiplicity of relations both within the community and the world at
large’ (114). That is, the community is not isolated, but can actively work with the
292 P. Orsmond and S. Merry

environment outside the community, including with other communities or learning

networks. A way this interaction may occur is through the notion of brokers
(Wenger 1998), who make connections across communities of practice and ‘open up
new possibilities for meaning’ (109). Within a community, participation and hence
learning ‘is always based on situated negotiation and re-negotiation of meaning in
the world’ (51).
Learning through negotiation leads to engagement with a learning curriculum
that consists of a ‘field of learning resources in everyday practice viewed from the
perspective of learners … and consisting of situated opportunities for the improvised
development of new practice’ (Lave and Wenger 1991, 97). This differs from the
teaching curriculum which ‘supplies and thereby limits structuring resources for
learning’ (97). This understanding of a teaching curriculum perhaps resonates with
Biggs (2003) notion of a curriculum in terms of constructive alignment.
Lave and Wenger (1991) saw communities broadly as a ‘set of relations among
person, activity and world over time and in relation with other tangential and over-
lapping communities of practice’ (98). This broader framework means that the social
learning that occurs within communities of practice has multiple dimensions. Learn-
ing is distributed; located not in the head but ‘in the relationship between the person
and the world … a social person in a social world’ (Wenger 2010, 179).
Aware that students appeared to engage in a number of practices outside the
overt curriculum, such as discussing assignments, being members of study groups
and sharing resources, Orsmond, Merry, and Callaghan (2013) established that stu-
dents entering higher education already had social learning attributes that allowed
them to develop a set of relations among person, activity and world during their
undergraduate study. That is, for students’ learning is relational in nature. Students
appear naturally, almost spontaneously, to conduct their learning in accordance with
Wenger’s (1998) conceptual communities of practice framework and, importantly,
these communities evolved defined patterns of practice outside of the overt curricu-
lum. Orsmond, Merry, and Callaghan (2013) also showed that students learnt from
outside higher education through interactions with social learning (face-to-face) net-
works. Situated learning from these networks influences their curricular learning
practices, enabling brokering to take place. Orsmond and Zvauya (2015) have also
shown that, for graduate-entry medical students, community and social network
learning were important factors in a problem-based learning curriculum.
Therefore, students in a situated learning environment such as a community of
practice are interdependent learners, where the inter nature of the learner reflects the
distributed nature of their learning practices; learning is not simply the result of a
teaching curriculum, but it occurs from participation in a given practice. This inter-
dependent learning practice, which requires the ability to negotiate meaning, may
involve aspects of Hughes’ (2010) discussion of identity and belonging, and the
importance of social, operational and knowledge-related identity congruence. Thus,
negotiated meaning, learning and identity development are linked. Furthermore,
interdependent learning has an importance regarding professional development. For
example, in medical practice, it is important that practitioners are able to negotiate
the multifaceted nature of interprofessional relationships and complex identities as
discussed by Adams et al. (2006).
In sum, communities of practice enable students to negotiate and renegotiate the
meaning of tutor constructed artefacts, and, by looking out from their community
towards institutional learning environments, students are changed as learners, so
 Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 293

developing their learning strategies and professional identities. Since the higher
education curriculum is designed such that the bulk of student learning occurs out-
side formal taught sessions, student communities of practice would seem to be a key
facet of students’ development. It is therefore surprising that facilitating students’ sit-
uated learning within communities of practice has received so little attention when
higher education curricula are designed and implemented.

Tutor constructed artefacts and student community learning

Tutors often attempt to clarify marking criteria in order to facilitate students’ learn-
ing when undergoing assessments. Yet, Barnacle and Mewburn (2010) discuss how
knowledge, which may include tutors’ understanding of marking criteria, cannot be
directly transferred to others. In its movement the information is translated. Hence, a
given aspect of knowledge from a tutor generates different processes in students that
lead to different realities, and these realities may change over time as students pro-
gress. Wittgenstein (2003, 46) states ‘the meaning [of a word] is the use we make of
the word … when we hear or say it, we grasp it in a flash, and what we grasp in this
way is surely something different from the use which is extended in time’. In terms
of student use of tutor marking criteria, one interpretation of this is that, once a stu-
dent has grasped the meaning of a word, there is something they ‘can do’ (Baker
and Hacker 1984, 257), and this meaning and action may change over time.
This interpretation of word use supports Rommetveit’s (2003, 214) discussion of
the work of Voloshinov, who, originally writing in Russian, states that ‘the word is a
two-sided act … determined by whose word it is and for whom it is meant’. This
determination of meaning is well illustrated by Hendry and Anderson (2013, 764),
who, while using exemplars to develop students’ understanding of the quality of
essays, found that ‘many students were … surprised to find in class that their col-
leagues had developed different views of the essays’. Knowing that knowledge is
not fixed has two implications for teaching and learning practice in areas of curricu-
lum and assessment design. Firstly, identities that develop may be understood as
provisional (Ibarra 1999). That is, students may consider themselves in different
ways as a result of ongoing social learning experiences, because the ‘structure of
knowledge is provisional and personally constructed, rather than an external, objec-
tive reality’ (Winter 2003, 121). Thus, when learning occurs there is a change in
provisional identity. Learning is therefore seen in term of identity change.
The second implication can be seen in consideration of tutor constructed artefacts
like marking criteria and feedback use. When tutors’ marking criteria enter the stu-
dent community, two actions are likely to result:

(1) Marking criteria are translated rather than transferred, and as such individual
students interpret and create their own reality as to how the criteria can be
used. Marking criteria enter student communities of practice and their mean-
ing is negotiated, through mutual engagement within the community. As
Wenger (1998, 80) discusses, the power that institutions have over the prac-
tice of communities is always mediated. It is ‘the community that negotiates
its enterprise’.
(2) Students may understand marking criteria in a particular way when they are
received, but as the students change as learners, the criteria may develop
new meanings.
294 P. Orsmond and S. Merry

These two factors may explain why the question ‘How much clarification of
marking criteria is required?’ is unanswerable. Meaning can be lost in translation
because each student is engaged, with varying degrees of success, in an ongoing
process of negotiating meaning. Thus, Sadler (2013) discusses how it is not possible
to tell what should or should not be noticed in different contexts, and Knight (2002,
280) noted that ‘criteria used prevent or even impede communication between
communities’. Torrance (2012) discusses the requirements for what he calls transfor-
mative assessment. He argues that most assessment is conformative, in that it
emphasises marking criteria compliance so making students aware of the what and
how of criteria. Transformative assessment requires additionally for students to be
made aware of the why of criteria, ‘so that they can critique, de-construct and reject
them, and understand that other criteria might be more appropriately invoked. If you
[students] wish to pursue a different learning agenda and can justify this divergence,
so be it.’ (338). Understanding the why of criteria is part of the negotiation process.
In transformative assessment, students are encouraged to make judgements; an attri-
bute which has been an aim of higher education for over 60 years (Rogers 2003).
Hussey and Smith (2002) have previously expressed the opinion that learning out-
comes have been misappropriated as measurement of higher education teaching. A
similar argument might be made for marking criteria in terms of misappropriating
learning in higher education.
A characteristic of transformative assessment is that it does require tutors to
make more holistic judgements concerning the quality of students’ work, and such
judgements can be perceived as less robust and, possibly, more norm-referenced
than judgements based on specific individual criteria (Sadler 2009). The need for
robust measurement of student learning in higher education is acknowledged, but, as
Sadler discusses, marking criteria designed to assess complex works are often, in
reality, interdependent rather than distinct and may themselves be interpreted in dif-
ferent ways by different tutors. Sadler (2009) concludes that properly done holistic
appraisals can generate a truer representation of students’ performance than preset
criteria, so the empirical study of Bloxham, Boyd, and Orr (2011) is reassuring.
They found that a ‘high proportion of the tutors did not make use of written criteria
in their marking and, where they were used, it was largely a post hoc process in
refining, checking or justifying a holistic decision’. Clearly, more work is required
in this area, but further discussion is beyond the scope of this paper.
That knowledge can only be learnt through a student’s own experiences within a
situated learning environment, and meaning gained through negotiated practices,
would be a pathway towards self-monitoring; an important goal of higher education
learning (Boud and Associates 2010). This is an important consideration because
there has been much debate over marking criteria and their meaning, as if meaning
can be directly transferred to students or sufficient clarification can ever be given.
Students do undertake tasks which they know are self-generated and hence situated
within their own learning environment. This is illustrated by a quote from a high-
achieving student (Orsmond and Merry 2013, 744), who seems to have made a
judgement concerning their work without reference to tutor provided criteria.
If you take a piece of coursework that I did in the first year and compare it to a piece,
like an essay, that [I’ve] written this year [Year 3], you’d see a total change in [my]
style of writing and that is not something that’s been instilled in me by anyone else,
that is something that I’ve acquired.
 Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 295

Hughes (2011), in addressing the limitations of criteria-driven assessment, advocates

an ipsative approach in which students are encouraged to explicitly look at their pre-
vious performances. Here, the learner can consider their progress rather than ‘what
is lacking in the performance gap’ (361). This may help ‘learners to understand what
learning means to them’ (Torrance 2012, 334), since it enables them to explore their
own performance gap rather than endeavouring to use external criteria to improve
their work. In the student quote, learning has not been instilled, but acquired. The
learning was not understood in terms of marking criteria, but in how meaning has
been achieved and in terms of an ontological transformation. This notion of becom-
ing has relevance in terms of identity development.
Another institutional artefact, feedback, may be similarly translated and meaning
negotiated when received by students. Students within communities of practice have
been shown to carry out self-assessment, as defined by Boud (1995), with various
degrees of success. So important is self-assessment that Orsmond and Merry (2013)
were able to demonstrate it as a defining feature separating high- and non-
high-achieving final-year biology undergraduates. Their findings resonate with the
idea of cue seekers and cue-deaf students, as discussed by Miller and Parlett (1974).
Cue-seeker students were ‘remarkably self-aware … studied extremely hard … [and
understood] the exam system [as being] artificial rather than a real test of academic
ability’ (69). Cue-deaf students saw the teacher as in authority, giving you ‘what
was best for you’ and that there existed a body of ‘right’ knowledge’ (71). Students’
ability to self-assess has important implications for tutor practice. High achieving
students used tutor feedback indicating strong internal regulation, with ownership of
their learning, that could be considered in terms of what Hughes (2010) refers to as
social, operational and knowledge related identity congruence. Orsmond and Merry
(2013, 745) provide an example:
Once I had a problem [regarding feedback] with my dissertation supervisor. I thought
I’d done things wrong … but I spoke to other people who were also his project stu-
dents and had the same problem … It wasn’t a case that we were doing something
wrong … it was more the feedback he was giving wasn’t relevant to what we were try-
ing to say.
The ‘we’ in the above quote is a statement of identity – both individual and commu-
nity. Non-highachieving students are dependent on external regulation and tutor
feedback may only serve to maintain this dependency. An example of this from
Orsmond and Merry (2013, 748):
I’ve spoken to friends … and chances are they’ve been marked by a different tutor …
not being able to talk to the tutor [who marked their friend’s work] … so talking to
friends you … gives you a broader perspective of what [tutors] are after.
A strong argument could be made for providing less, or no, tutor feedback to these
students. Rather than providing tutor feedback, perhaps tutors’ time would be better
spent on enhancing these students’ self-assessment capabilities, thus enhancing self-
and peer feedback. To do this, students may need to be placed in dialogic situations
where they are required to negotiate meaning. It has been recognised that self-
assessment judgements within situated learning environments involve the ability to
negotiate meaning (Orsmond, Merry, and Handley 2013), and non-high-achieving
students, being externally regulated, may be poor at such negotiation. Giving them
more tutor feedback is not going to address that. Furthermore, giving tutor feedback
may mask the lack of identity development resulting from poor negotiating skills. In
296 P. Orsmond and S. Merry

this context, it is interesting to note that Nicol, Thomson, and Breslin (2014),
writing from a different perspective, also recognised the need to strengthen ‘inner
feedback processes’.

Existing but unrecognised examples of situated learning from higher education

assessment research
Gibbs (1999) considers ways of using assessment to strategically change the way
students learn. One example described by Gibbs is that of Norwegian engineers
who, following a change to their assessment regimen, worked in a situated learning
environment where they implemented social learning practices. We would propose
that this is not, as Gibbs suggests, strategically changing how students learn, rather
this is how students’ naturally learn; and the changed assessment practice, which
altered the learning context, merely allowed students to adopt their inherent learning
practices within the curriculum. Brown, Bull, and Pendlebury (1997, 7) have also
supported Gibbs’ view, by stating ‘if you want to change student learning then
change the methods of assessment’. The authors of this article would like to chal-
lenge such a belief. Our argument is not about the role of assessment in measuring
learning, but that to change learning by changing assessment methods is a very con-
trived act. If you understand how students learn, then you do not need to invoke
assessment. We suggest if you want to change student learning then change the
learning context. If you want to assess learning then assessment methods must
reflect the learning context. In rephrasing Brown, Bull, and Pendlebury’s (1997)
statement in this way, the emphasis remains fixed on learning; learning is not sub-
sumed by assessment.
The shift of emphasis from assessment to learning allows learning to be seen in
a broader context, social cognitive and situated learning in communities, and as such
provides ways of helping students improve as learners. For example, for
non-high-achieving students the emphasis shifts from tutor assessment and tutor-
generated feedback to developing and enhancing ways of negotiating meaning and
self-assessment. After all, learning does not just occur because people are assessed,
or as Torrance (2012, 331) states, ‘many people learned many things long before the
language of “learning goals” was invented’. The example by Gibbs (1999) perhaps
illustrates how learning has been institutionalised by tutors.
Students are able to negotiate meaning, and hence develop their self-assessment
capabilities within the curriculum if this is supported by their learning environment.
However, the nature of the situated learning that occurs may not be recognised in
the analyses of learning that occur.
The interesting study of Boyd and Cowan (1985) provides an extreme, but use-
ful, illustration in which a class of 35 civil engineering design undergraduates was
split into two groups for their third-year study. Twenty-three students were taught in
the conventional way with lectures and tutorials. The remaining 12 students in the
class were the experimental group, and for these students the tutor provided nothing
except to facilitate the learning to which the students aspired and how they intended
to assess it. During their secondterm students were asked to state their priorities for
the coming week. Responses from the taught group concerned understanding their
notes and keeping up to date, and these strongly contrasted with those from the
experimental group, which concerned solutions to design problems and integrating
theory and practice. While this study adopted a cognitive approach to analyse the
 Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 297

data, with individual learning considered via the deep/surface metaphor, it is clear
that situated learning occurred. Students in the experimental group recognised that
to succeed they needed to work and talk together, and the language used is very
much of a community nature: ‘We still had problems’, ‘We still had moments of
doubt’, ‘We still felt sometimes we were walking up the down escalator, but I think
We all knew that We had something that worked and that was a start’ (226). This
social learning process carried on until the end of the year: ‘We continued in trios
and We spent time discussing each stage of the assessment’ (226). Our emphases
are in bold and capitalised.
McCune and Hounsell (2005) investigated final-year biology undergraduate stu-
dents’ grasp of the distinctive ways of thinking and practising (WTP) in the disci-
pline. From this study, it was evident that ‘WTP was most clearly evident
in situations in which students were pursuing active rather than passive learning
tasks’ (285). McCune and Hounsell interpreted their findings in terms of construc-
tive alignment and, in particular, Biggs (2003) level-three thinking about teaching
which considers: (a) what it means to understand content in the way we want it to
be understood, and (b) what kind of teaching/learning activities are required to reach
those kinds of understanding. Apart from the dilemma that we, the community of
tutors, may not have a common understanding, it has already been noted that stu-
dents are very capable of working within the paradigm of what tutors’ want, and
this may not be what they, the students, really think themselves. When considered in
terms of social learning, Boyd and Cowan and McCune and Hounsell provide evi-
dence that students utilise ways of learning outside the overt curriculum that are not
acknowledged or explored. This has important consequences.
While the argument can be made that tutors’ assessment can influence learning,
the study of Boyd and Cowan showed that the development of self-assessment pro-
cesses are crucial to changing approaches to learning. It is apparent that there are
more fundamental factors than assessment in bringing about a change in learning; a
key factor being the context of learning, the negotiation of meaning and identity
development. Self-assessment can change the learning context because it requires a
reappraisal of what it means to learn, and then to find a direction and ultimately to
change practice. Boyd was one of the student participants in the experimental group
of the study described by Boyd and Cowan, and when the study was complete she
returned to conventional teaching and assessments. She retained her commitment to
managing her own learning only when she ‘opted to work on her own criteria (her
context) rather than [that of] her supervisors (institutional context)’ (234). Our inter-
pretation is given in brackets.

The effects of students’ situated learning on the development of identity

Students will naturally have constructed their own alignment of learning based on
their own multiple learning outcomes, because they are in the process of developing
their own personal and professional identities, as illustrated by this quote from
Orsmond, Merry and Handley (2013, 127) which shows three separate processes
that a single student used to understand tutor feedback.
I tend to look at it more as a scientist … [from] that point of view … this is my way
of assessing feedback.
298 P. Orsmond and S. Merry

Some of them [tutors] actually put it [criteria] on a cover sheet on the front and their
[standards] are circled.
Looking back over previous grades and what comments they made about it, I kind of
got in my mind what level I think my essays are generally at.
Learning implies becoming a different person. It involves, for students, the construc-
tion of professional identities that is ‘ways of being and relating in a professional
context’ (Goldie 2012, 641). McCune and Hounsell (2005, 267) well illustrate this
notion of becoming within active student learning activities. Students undertaking
placements stated: ‘You’ve gone up a level, you’re not a student anymore’ and ‘the
placement has definitely taught me to think more like a scientist’. Orsmond, Merry
and Callaghan (2013) show how, for students, a sense of identity can result from
discussions in social learning networks: ‘I felt really like a scientist … I was talking
to a family member about my dissertation and they seemed really interested … I
was going into … depth’ (899), or from communities of practice: ‘I like to talk to
different types of groups [to find out what they know] and if they’re not interested
I’ll try and change my personality … to fit’ (896). It seems that students’ identity
can develop as a result of a range of experiences.
Students’ developing identities can have broad effects on their approaches to the
curriculum and academic learning, as indicated by a student is responding to tutor
feedback and making their own judgement as to its worth in terms of how she per-
ceived herself as a creative writer:
feedback on … a writing style, I do take it, and superimpose it onto my creative side
but, obviously that doesn’t quite work … the academic and creative … If you’re aim-
ing to be a research scientist who’s going to be putting out papers and publications …
then I think you’re more likely to … take the feedback on an essay [academic writing]
… whereas for me, personally, I don’t, really have any, intentions to be writing papers.
(Orsmond and Merry, unpublished work)
Brown, Bull, and Pendlebury (1997, 7) claim that ‘assessment defines how they
[students] come to see themselves as students’. At onelevel assessment does define
students, for example, as being able to achieve or not in terms of passing
examinations. However, students define themselves in other ways in the absence of
assessment. If tutors fail to recognise this, they will not consider the link between
identity and learning in their curriculum design. When students enrol onto a degree
programme they are enrolled on a specific degree programme, for example, Animal
Biology. That is a statement of identity. Even if students do not fully understand
what an animal biologist is, they have identified that as their area of study, and
tutors should therefore design a curriculum that allows development into an animal
biologist; that is that allows students to become members of the community of
animal biological practice, and learning to talk the language of animal biology is
key to that. For Lave and Wenger (1991), learners cannot learn from talk as a
replacement for legitimate peripheral participation, they learn to talk as a key com-
ponent of legitimate peripheral participation. Students do not always understand
their progression through three years of study in terms of identity development and
the notion of becoming. While Boud (1988) is correct, in making the link between
student responsibility for their own learning and their use of prior experiences and
knowledge, it might be more helpful rather than considering experiences to think in
terms of identity development.
 Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 299

Packer and Goicoechea (2000, 235) consider the shift from family member to
student as an ontological transformation. The new individual does not replace the
old one, but ‘assumes different modes’ of subjectivity in a different context. This is
reflected within the situated learning experience within higher education in terms of
changing community practice and social learning networks; students are recognised
as subject experts by family and friends and identity is given to them (Orsmond,
Merry, and Callaghan 2013). Thus, identity is a more powerful force in
understanding learning than experiences per se.

Suggested future directions: the provision of more cheese

From a faculty member’s perspective, learning and identity development can be
considered from vantage point of curriculum design. Fraser and Bosanquet (2006)
discuss a range of curriculum designs. Their Category D, which understands the cur-
riculum as a ‘dynamic and interactive process of learning’ (275), discusses change
as a human being through the educational process; and their Category C, where the
curriculum is understood as ‘the students’ experience of learning’ (274), considers
how the curriculum is shaped by negotiation and how negotiation is undertaken is
an indicator of identity change. It is possible to see assessment and feedback
activities – for example, ipsative assessment (Hughes 2011), the development of
evaluative judgement with self-assessment and peer assessment (Cowan 2010;
Sadler 2013) and student discussions of coursework extracts (Winter 2003) – being
integrated into curricula that emphasise negotiation. These examples would allow
students to construct their own learning, and allow tutors to make explicit that
assessment tasks are often open-ended and require students to be ‘improvising with
resources they already possess’ (Winter 2003, 120). These types of curricula allow
students to recognise the inherent situated nature of their own learning, and so they
allow students to ‘identify themselves as capable learners who can take initiatives
and guide their own learning’ (Hedegaard 1998, 121).
In education, ‘new research findings or even best practices spread slowly, if at
all’ (Draper and Nicol 2013, 190); a reason being that ‘disciplinary differences …
make it difficult for academics to appreciate that educational innovations in other
disciplines are relevant to their own’ (190). Hence, some resistance to the
widespread adoption of the types of changes suggested above is to be anticipated,
with a likely concern being that students might miss intended learning within
time-limited higher education delivery. This concern, a product of the chalk, may in
reality be unfounded. For example, the REAP project (Re-engineering Asessment
Practices in Higher Education, http://www.reap.ac.uk), which promoted peer and
self-assessment as a key concept, and involved 10 modules spread across five
faculties at the University of Strathclyde, showed measurable gains in student test
results in six modules and in no module was tutor workload increased (Draper and
Nicol 2013).
The aim of this paper was to question the notion of interpreting higher education
learning research with narrow emphasis on what occurs in the classroom, and with
learning as an individual event. Our argument is supported by previous studies con-
cerning students’ use of assessment marking criteria and feedback outside the overt
curriculum. Higher education curricula indicate that lectures, tutorials and other for-
mal classes represent a minority of students’ total learning time, yet there is often an
implicit assumption that what occurs in these settings truly reflects how students
300 P. Orsmond and S. Merry

learn at university. An analogy would be that the behaviour of animals confined in a

zoo is truly representative of their behaviour in the wild. We know that this is not
the case for animals, because we also study behaviour in the wild.
This paper purports that outside of the overt curriculum students appear to be
interdependent learners, participating in communities of practice and learning social
networks where sense-making occurs through negotiation, and identity development
takes place. Thus, rather than manipulating student learning through assessment
practices within the overt curriculum, tutors should try to more fully understand the
rich learning that occurs outside the overt curriculum of the university, and so seek
to use the abundant resources that students themselves develop. Tutors cannot be
fully effective if they fail to understand a major component of students’ learning.
For the sake of current and future students it is beholden on teaching and learning
researchers to endeavour to fill this gap. Further student-centred research studies
using either historical or peer cohort controls are required to investigate the effec-
tiveness of teaching interventions specifically designed to enhance students’ ability
to negotiate and make sense of complex information. Such interventions in them-
selves are not novel; two examples being peer review of exemplars and group pro-
jects requiring students to combine individual fieldwork, laboratory or literature
findings into joint outputs.
By way of illustration, a recent intervention study (Nicol, Thomson, and Breslin
2014, 113) considered peer reviewing within group projects in engineering design.
The authors, writing from an individual cognitive perspective, found this interven-
tion addressed ‘a common limitation of received feedback, namely that it … does
not necessarily push the student to think beyond the confines of their own produc-
tion’. It is striking to note, however, that the quote used to illustrate this finding
reflects material used by Orsmond, Merry, and Callaghan (2013) to illustrate joint
enterprise as an aspect of situated learning outside the overt curriculum. An interpre-
tation of this similarity is that the intervention of Nicol, Thomson, and Breslin
(2014) served to bring students’ inherent situated learning into the overt curriculum;
a view supported by another of their findings that the ‘student’s own experiences’
(117) give rise to a set of criteria that are used in reviewing.
We would argue that such situated learning should not be overlooked. In this
particular case, knowledge of the students’ experiences is required to fully
understand how their criteria are developed, and to design subsequent curriculum
interventions that may enhance students’ experiences in productive ways. At present,
the evaluation of educational interventions regarding their effects on both how stu-
dents’ participate in learning outside the overt curriculum and on students’ overall
learning performance in higher education is under explored.

Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank both professor Harry Torrance and Dr Karen Handley for
their useful discussions concerning drafts of the manuscript. Thanks are also due to the two
anonymous referees for their helpful comments on our initial submission.

Disclosure statement
The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
 Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 301

Notes on contributors
Paul Orsmond is a senior lecturer within the Faculty of Computing, Engineering and Sciences
at Staffordshire University. His interests are in learning processes.

Stephen Merry is a visiting research fellow within the Faculty of Computing, Engineering
and Sciences at Staffordshire University. His interests include a) the use of cell culture to
investigate disease processes and b) how students use feedback to develop their learning.

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