An assessment framework

"It is generally recognized that good assessment is assessment that is valid, reliable and fit for its purpose" and should also "enable certification or classification of students' achievements and to promote and enhance students' learning" (AUTC Project, p.6). A further, often forgotten purpose of assessment, is to provide feedback, not only to the students (as implicit in the foregoing), but also to teaching staff.

At a most fundamental level, the complex graduate attribute agenda that we have embraced prompts the query: How can we assure the quality of our assessment of students' skills development? The answer to which my Faculty arrived is that we should be able to assure the quality of that assessment if it satisfies certain criteria (that we have distilled from the educational literature).

Ultimately, we sought to reduce those criteria to a checklist form that staff may now access via the Faculty website (with some explanation of what we understand by each item available as an embedded explanatory link). Using the checklist, the hypothesis is that the details of each assessment method we have (or locate) can be evaluated against the criteria to check for quality. This should give us some informed-by-principle idea of a "quality-rating" or "score" for each assessment item. At the very least, it will certainly highlight strengths and/ or weaknesses both at the micro task level and at the macro whole-of-course level, the latter across the incremental development of a given skill.

For example: one of the skills which contributes to the graduate capability of "Communication" is "oral presentation". This is a skill that has been mapped onto at least nine subjects in the undergraduate curriculum through three levels of skills progressions (notionally years 1, 2 and 3 of the degree) (Kift, 2002). Various assessment tasks have been designed to assess this skill in the different subjects. When the body of these tasks is gauged as against the assessment framework we have developed, we should be able to demonstrate whether those assessment tasks "work" and, if they work, why they work (on the basis that they meet the criteria that have been established). If some aspect of the development of the skill is lacking across the course then that too can be addressed to ensure that the skill has been assessed comprehensively.

Over the course of the project, we have in fact filtered a range of assessment methods through the checklist/ framework and, by that process, have sought to elucidate the process for preferred skills assessment in a given area of skilled behavior by reference to best (or at least good) practice assessment methods (which may have been constructed by amalgamating the best features of several assessment tasks). These good practice tasks have then been trialled and evaluated. The framework criteria were then modified as appropriate on the basis of the evaluation and feedback from those trials.

Importantly for the Faculty, the final checklist needed to be a practical tool that all Faculty staff (including sessionals, none of whom necessarily have any background in educational theory) will feel comfortable in using and referring to: it had to be accessible in terms of its functionality and its language. To have academic credibility, it also needed to be sufficiently rigorous to achieve its stated aim of assuring the quality of assessment tasks. Desirably, it should further promote good practice by acting as a prompt for reflection by staff on their daily teaching, learning and assessment work. Acknowledging how resource intensive skills development is, and the consequent impact that it has had on academic workloads (particularly, in terms of the level of feedback required to support student learning), another very important consideration for us was that any assessment and feedback model adopted must be "manageable", in the simple sense that we can deliver on it given current staffing and resourcing constraints.

In the terms referred to earlier in this paper, it is in this latter way that a realistic mediation of the overarching institutional agenda with the capacity for coalface enactment is effected. A further allowance in this regard is the pragmatic acknowledgment that there must be room for rational comprise between desirable assessment of skilled behavior and the concept of "across whole-of-course assessment". By way of specific example (Knight, 2001), in assessing the skill of oral communication in its oral presentation aspect, once we have agreed on criteria that encapsulate what a good performance of that task might look like (which the team managing that project area did), the desirable approach would be to judge that performance multiple times by a number of different trained assessors to view a reasonably representative sample of the range of possible student performances. Within current resourcing limitations, certainly with the large cohort of students in my Faculty, this is simply not possible. However, as Knight observes,

"(T)his does not force us into the preposterous position of suggesting that higher education can only produce tolerably reliable judgements of low level, achievements such as information recall. The answer to this and many other assessment problems is a program-level answer, dependent on leadership and systemic thinking. It may be impossible to get reliable judgements of skill at oral presentation out of one module but it is not hard to see how they could be had from a program-wide approach to assessment...What the individual teacher cannot afford, let alone manage, programs can." (Knight, 2001, p.15)

In this way, when the skill has been mapped onto nine subjects in the undergraduate curriculum through three levels of skills progressions (Kift, 2002), the assessment becomes a "program-wide assessment plan, so that by the time students came to graduate there would be many measures of performance by different observers all using the language of a common observation schedule or set of assessment criteria". (Knight, 2001, p.22)

The checklist that has been formulated is explicated further below. The checklist was refined once the initial assessment tasks (in the project areas) were trialled and evaluated. On the finalized Grant website, each item on the checklist is accompanied by a short explanation (embedded on the site). The language used in the final version strives to be staff-centred to aid accessibility.

اخر الاخبار

اخبار العتبة العباسية المقدسة

جمعيَّة العميد تعقد اجتماعًا مع الهيأة العُليا لإحياء التراث استعدادًا ليوم اللغة العربية

استعدادًا لزيارة الأربعين العتبة العباسية المقدسة تعزّز خزين المياه في مجمع أبي الفضل العباس (عليه السلام) عبر خزانات بسعة 900م3

الهيأة العليا لإحياء التراث تنهي استعداداتها لعقد مؤتمر الإمام الحسن (عليه السلام) الثاني عشر في النجف

المجمَع العلمي ينظّم محاضرة توعوية لطلبة مشروع الحفظ في بغداد

المزيد

الآخبار الصحية

أخصائية تكشف خطورة عادة "شائعة" في غسل المناشف

دراسة: بيضة واحدة أسبوعيا قد تقي من الإصابة بـ

على عكس الشائع.. هذا هو العدد المثالي للخطوات اليومية !

شهر التوعية بالساركوما... أطباء يحذرون من "السرطان الصامت"

المزيد

الآخبار التكنلوجية

ذكر أم أنثى؟.. دراسة تنسف الاعتقاد الشائع حول جنس المولود

بحجم برج بيزا.. تحذير من كويكب يقترب من الأرض في هذا الموعد

أقصر يوم في تاريخ البشرية.. الموعد قريب ؟!!

مايكروسوفت تحذر شركات وأجهزة حكومية من هجوم "يوم الصفر"

المزيد

مواضيع ذات صلة

Assessment practices within a graduate attributes framework The need for the development of generic skills

Creating a Teaching and Learning Culture to Embed Graduate Attributes into Assessment Practices

An Assistant Dean, Learning and Teachings Role in Quality Assuring Assessment Conclusions

The assessment framework a basis for improvement.

The assessment framework deconstructed

An assessment framework: some background and a sales spiel

Why an assessment framework?

Assessing problematic graduate attributes: a case study

Influence by scholarship

Influence by operationalization

Influence as mentor

Curriculum influence