A Nobel Prize for Improving Assessment?
1 December 2017
Honorary Professor Gordon Joughin give us an interesting take on the 2017 Nobel Prize in Economics, which has some insight for assessment researchers in terms of judgement and decision making behaviours of both students and teachers.
In October the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Economics (or, to give it its rather long formal title, ‘The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel’) to Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago “for his contributions to behavioural economics”. What could this possibly have to do with how we assess our students’ learning? Well, the work that won Thaler the prize has a strong psychological bent and deals with judgement and decision-making. In CRADLE we have been looking at judgement – how students make evaluative judgements about their own work, and decision-making – deciding how to assess students, including how to improve current assessment tasks*. We believe that the work of Thaler and his colleagues might have some intriguing implications for both of these processes.
“It’s my work!”
One of Thaler’s big ideas is about ownership. Put most simply, we tend to overvalue an object if we have a sense of ownership of it, regardless of its inherent value or how we came by it. Thaler called this phenomenon ‘the endowment effect’. It raises two questions for us regarding assessment. Firstly, can such a sense of ownership lead students to overvalue their own work, exaggerating its positive qualities while failing fully to appreciate its limitations, especially when they have worked hard to create that work? Secondly, can a sense of ownership lead teachers to overvalue the assessment regimes they have designed and make them somewhat reluctant to change their assessment tasks? One of the background papers to Thaler’s Prize states that “people tend to experience the negative feeling of a loss more strongly than the positive sense of an equally large gain”**. Given this tendency, might a teacher, while appreciating the potential gains in a new type of assessment task, feel a greater sense of loss in giving up a long-established method and leave things as they are?
“I’m doing the best that I can” (Lennon-McCartney)
Thaler’s work is closely related to the work of another Economics Prize winner, Herb Simon (1978), which we have found compelling. Simon emphasised the limits to our decision-making – we never have enough information or time, and our ability to process the information we do have is far from perfect. He used the term ‘bounded rationality’ to describe this situation, and introduced the term ‘satisficing’ to describe how we come up with decisions that are imperfect but ones that we will be satisfied with. So it is with our assessment planning, but while we accept limitations and do the best we can within them, we should also be on the lookout for new ideas, spend a little more time than we usually manage on planning assessment, and use the wisdom of experienced and knowledgeable colleagues to help us think through our assessment tasks.
Thinking about assessment: fast and slow
Thaler builds on Simon’s work, but he has also been strongly influenced by yet another winner of the Economics Prize, Daniel Kahneman (2002). Like many psychologists (yes, he is not an economist, but neither was Simon – a curious state of affairs for winners of this most glittering of prizes in economics), Kahneman contrasts slow, deliberate, considered judgement and decision-making with fast, unconscious processes that can lead us astray. The latter include ‘status quo bias’ which can tie us to existing assessment methods, and ‘overconfidence’ which can cause us to have unwarranted confidence in new or revised assessment plans. Kahneman has created the deceptively simple aphorism for judgement or decision-making, ‘What you see is all there is’. According to this WYSIATI principle, when our students judge their own work or when we design assessment tasks, all we have to work with is what we currently know and are aware of. So to improve our assessment practices, we need to become more aware of what is possible, what factors we should be keeping in mind, and what might divert our otherwise good judgement – we need to come to see more than we currently do.
We speculate about these ideas and will continue to consider their implications for assessment in higher education. They cry out for empirical research in this context.
Some light reading
These three winners of ‘The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel’ have had prodigious publication outputs in their disciplines. Fortunately for us, each has also produced work that is highly accessible to a broader audience and which highlights everyday applications of their findings. Thaler has written two popular books on judgement and decision-making: Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness (London, Penguin, 2009) and Misbehaving: How Economics Became Behavioural (London, Penguin, 2015). Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow (London, Penguin, 2011) is another best-seller that provides a comprehensive overview of unconscious factors that can distort or judgement. Each of these books makes for entertaining as well as enlightening reading.
If you only have 10 minutes to spare, check out the ‘Popular Science Background’ to Thaler’s Nobel award, ‘Easy money or a golden pension? Integrating economics and psychology.’
The longer background paper from The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, ‘Richard Thaler: Integrating Economics with Psychology’ includes references to both Simon and Kahneman.
* Boud D, Ajjawi R, Dawson P, & Tai J (Eds.) (forthcoming). Developing Evaluative Judgement: Assessment for Knowing and Producing Quality Work. Abingdon: Routledge.
* Joughin, G, Dawson, P., & Boud, D. (2017). ‘Improving assessment tasks through addressing our unconscious limits to change’. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 42(8): 1221-1232.
** The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (2017). ‘Easy money or a golden pension? Integrating economics and psychology’. p. 2.
