Beyond Just Metrics: For a Renewed Approach to Assessment in Higher Education

Assessment and evaluation in education were a subject of quantification early in the history of the educational systems, given their crucial role to allegedly support transparency, accountability and effectiveness. The aim of this chapter is to scrutinise the evolution of recent discourses relating assessment in higher education, to uncover the fallacies of quantification, later transformed into data-driven practices, connected to assessment. The chapter is divided in four sections where we seek for connections between the evolution of assessment, metrics and quantification in higher education; the technological, data-driven transformation of assessment practices; and, hence, the compelling need of critical data literacy in liaison with assessment literacy. Overall, we conclude that (a) strengthening the idea of assessment as pedagogical practice may or may not adopt data, considering its main outcome to support learners’ development, instead of just producing quantifiable representations of the educational process; (b) data-driven practices within digitally mediated assessment are just another approach to produce representations which might or might not support the so-called “assessment for learning”; (c) the need to embrace critical “pedagogical-data” literacy, as the ability to read data as complex assemblage of practice and instruments. Overall, this approach could lead to a renewed assessment literacy.