Assessing problematic graduate attributes: a case study
المؤلف:
Sally Kift
المصدر:
Enhancing Teaching and Learning through Assessment
الجزء والصفحة:
P305-C26
2025-07-25
397
Assessing problematic graduate attributes: a case study
As has been the case in many institutional contexts, the "skills agenda (has offered) a fruitful point of engagement" (Boud & Falchikov, 2005, p.38) in my discipline - legal education. However, this does not occur serendipitously and/or without the intervention of a change agent.
With some prompting, in the late 1990s, the Faculty of Law at the Queensland University of Technology, Australia (QUT) committed itself to providing a package of learning, teaching and assessment opportunities that combined substantive content, theoretical and practical knowledge with the development of certain generic (and other discipline specific) skills; all of this in a legal context to a basic level of competency for all students, regardless of the diversity of their prior background and experience (Christensen & Kift, 2000). Just as the placement and assessment of substantive content is carefully considered in line with subject, year and program objectives, so also it was thought necessary to be deliberately thoughtful about the placement and assessment of generic (and discipline specific) skills as a "whole of course" exercise (Kift, 2002).
However, the renewal of the undergraduate (law) curriculum to address student learning outcomes framed in terms of mastery of both content knowledge and skilled behavior obviously required a fundamental re-evaluation of the validity and reliability of traditional assessment methods and examination of the latter's transferability to the new imperatives of assessing authentic skills learning.
It is in this context that this case study reports upon an institutional Learning and Teaching Development Large Grant, secured by the author's Faculty under the project leadership of the A/Dean, L&T, to address the assessment imperatives of an explicitly skills-focused agenda. At the abstract level, it serves amply to illustrate the possibilities of the curriculum leadership role of an A/Dean, L&T in the way conceptualized in Figure 1 in A conceptual framework for the A/ Dean's learning and teaching role. In the specific assessment-as-learning context, the case study examines the Faculty's progress towards the development of an "assessment framework"; designed to be a practical tool available to all teaching staff (including sessional teachers) that was sufficiently rigorous to assure the quality of our newly developed skills' assessment tasks.
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