Back on 30th June, Assessment in Higher Education (AHE) held a seminar in Manchester with the theme of “Transforming assessment and feedback in Higher Education on a wider scale: the challenge of change at institutional level”. The idea behind the seminar was partly to hold a smaller-scale event between our increasingly large bienniel conferences, though we had well over 100 attendees.
AHE are now working in collaboration with Transforming Assessment, and we live-streamed Sue Bloxham’s keynote to a further twenty or so people around the world. Then on 13th July we had a dedicated webinar to which three selected presenters from the seminar contributed. My involvement in both of these events meant that I had a double ‘bite at the cherry’. I heard one set of presentations at the seminar itself, then I heard the three presentations on 13th July , and chaired a discussion of overlapping themes. There was some fantastic stuff.
As I try to catch up with this blog, I’ll start by describing my take on Sue’s keynote. She started from the precept that assessment remains unfit for purpose – and change is slow. She went on to outline what she described as key barriers to assessment enhancement, where the two barriers that have most resonance with my own experience being:
- centrally imposed change, which produces resistance. Sue’s proposed solution is that we should put the focus for change on small low-level workgroups.
- the need for assessment literacy for staff. Here the focus must be on adequate professional development.
Sue went on to describe a framework which might be drawn upon to create the conditions for transformation at institutional or departmental level, based around
- key principles
- infrastructure
- strategy
- assessment literacy.
It was inspirational; now we just need to make the change happen. Don’t take my word for it though; you can watch the recording of Sue’s keynote here.
Departments across the University use a variety of both formative and summative assessments to test their students’ achievement of learning outcomes. For information on Good Practice in Examination and Assessment.