Higher-education students’ preference and perception regarding assessment methods: a systematic literature review.

Abstract

Assessment is an important part of the educational practice. Not only it is a measure of the student performance, but also it could participate in increasing the knowledge intake of students. In addition, students tend learn more if they are given an assessment method of their preference. This leads to the need of analysing students’ assessment preference comprehensively and in depth. Despite the abondance of empirical studies that measure the student’s assessment preference, there was only on article identified with a systematic literature review of the topic. The identified paper is more than two decades old which triggers the need to create one. For this, two database sources were searched with the relevant keywords and the final number of filtered articles is 38 out of more than 5,000 entries resulted from the search terms. These 38 articles are analysed, synthesized, and presented in a systematic literature review format. The main take away from this study is that there does not seem to be an agreement among studies on what students’ state or perceive as an appropriate assessment method. However, for specific types of questions or assessment, there could be an agreement between two studies or more. It was also found that majority of the studies suggest that multiple choice questions are preferred over essay-writing questions which is not always the case. There was an agreement though on the fact that COVID-19 triggered the need to restructure the teaching methods and consequently the assessment methods to online ones.