Assessment engineering: breaking down barriers between teaching and learning, and assessment

The complexity of today’s society is characterised by an infinite, dynamic and changing mass of information, the massive use of the internet, multimedia and educational technology and a rapidly changing labour market demanding a more flexible labour force that is directed towards a growing proportion of knowledgeintensive work in teams and lifelong learning (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995; Tynjälä, 1999). As a consequence, today’s knowledge community expects graduates not only to have a specific knowledge base but to be able to apply this knowledge to solve complex problems in an efficient way (Engel, 1997; Poikela and Poikela, 1997). New learning environments based on constructivist theory claim to develop an educational setting in which to reach this goal, making students’ learning the core issue and defining instruction as enhancing learning (Lea et al., 2003).