JISC

Summary

Assessment is often viewed as a series of one-off events. This means that learners do not benefit from feedback, they lack a sense of progress and self-reliance is not encouraged. This project will reconceptualise assessment from the perspective of an assessment career and use this to transform an institution’s assessment processes. An assessment career perspective involves taking a longitudinal view of assessment by building on a learner’s past experiences of assessment as well as current trajectories. Like a working career, an assessment career develops through a series of related events that join up to give a coherent and progressive pathway that is self-directed.

Previous initiatives suggest that linking up assessments by giving learners feedback on their progress (ipsative feedback) motivates learners and helps them focus on learning rather than grades. We will develop an Assessment Career framework to include ipsative assessment as well as multi-stage assessment and assessment career audits to help learners overcome negative past experiences and move forward. The VLE will support the framework through assessment templates and improving records of feedback over time.

The project will involve three phases. The first will create a baseline using existing institutional practice and use external research and development to refine the Assessment Career framework. In the second phase, five case studies will explore application of the framework in an efficient and sustainable way. In the third phase, the project will scale up innovation and share staff expertise by linking modular assessments, extending the new Assessment Career framework across programme clusters and embedding the framework into institutional structures and procedures. Details of the pilots and their evaluations will be made available to the HE sector, along with a review of how technology was used to support and scale up the Assessment Career framework across the institution.

Objectives

1. Document the range of assessment practice across the IOE and, in particular, to identify those assessment practices which students value most with regard to supporting their learning over time.
2. Build on the work of REAP, other projects such as MAC and institutional assessment needs, to develop a conceptual and practical model of the assessment career that can be used at an institutional level to benchmark existing assessment practice and plan development.
3. Apply the Assessment Career model to identify a set of best assessment practices that can be used more widely across IOE Masters and PGCE programmes.
4. Pilot the new assessment practices in five contrasting Masters modules (such as those focusing on research, health and clinical education, PGCE and Educational Psychology).
5. Provide those piloting new assessment practices with systems and technologies for supporting that practice, e.g. assessment templates, multi-stage assessments, ipsative feedback, multiple mixed methods of assessment, peer and self assessment, multi-source feedback and assessment career audits.
6. Evaluate the new pilot assessment practices to identify (a) student perceptions of whether, or in what ways, their learning has been supported as well as (b) teaching and support staff responses to the innovations.
7. Design systems and processes to scale up and embed the changes at an institutional level.
8. Achieve this change in professional assessment and feedback practice though redirecting workloads rather than workload intensification.

All the above objectives will be addressed in the project deliverables and all will be completed within the three years of the project timescale.

Anticipated Outputs and Outcomes

• D1 Baseline report including summary of previous projects and initiatives
• D2 Evaluation reports for each pilot
• D3 Assets from the case studies
• D4 Guidance and Support materials for developing an Assessment Career approach for other institutions
• D5 Institutional Evaluation of scaling up and embedding learning pathway enhancement through assessment
• Increased awareness of good practice in assessment and feedback across the institution and improved IOE reputation for excellence
• D6 Assessment templates

Project Blog:  

http://assessmentcareers.jiscinvolve.org/wp/