Why are principles important?
Educational principles are a way of summarising your shared educational values as a college or university. They serve to guide the design of learning teaching and assessment.
A well-thought-out set of principles:
- Describes a shared set of values and a vision
- Summarises and simplifies a lot of research evidence on good pedagogic practice
- Provides a benchmark for monitoring progress
- Serves as a driver for change
Principles offer a robust way of gaining ownership and buy-in and they need to be written in a way that requires action rather than passive acceptance.
Our seven principles
- Help learners understand what good looks like by engaging learners with the requirements and performance criteria for each task
- Support the personalised needs of learners by being accessible, inclusive and compassionate
- Foster active learning by recognising that engagement with learning resources, peers and tutors can all offer opportunities for formative development
- Develop autonomous learners by encouraging self-generated feedback, self-regulation, reflection, dialogue and peer review
- Manage staff and learner workload effectively by having the right assessment, at the right time, supported by efficient business processes
- Foster a motivated learning community by involving students in decision-making and supporting staff to critique and develop their own practice
- Promote learner employability by assessing authentic tasks and promoting ethical conduct
Applying the principles
The principles offer an actionable way to improve learning teaching and assessment and can be applied to any aspect of learning design.
There is no one size fits all approach. You need to decide what the principle means in your context and how best to apply it to the learning experience in your organisation. Our self-assessment template (.docx) allows you to adapt the principles to your own context. You can also download the self-assessment template as a pdf.
Do principles change over time?
Principles need to evolve over time if they are to reflect current education research and remain aspirational and a call to action.
The usefulness of educational principles drew widespread attention when Professor David Nicol published a set of principles for good assessment feedback practice as part of the Re-Engineering Assessment Practices (REAP) project in 20071.
Many education providers saw the value and adopted the idea so there are various sets of principles in the public domain2. Almost all of them are based on the basic REAP principles.
Our 2021 principles reflect the greater prominence of issues such as accessibility and inclusivity in current thinking. Where we continue to champion examples of good practice that were recognised some time ago, it is with a new perspective on why and how certain approaches are more effective than others.
It is too early to judge how long this set of principles will last. At the moment they represent a call to action and a manifesto for change. We very much hope to find that in five years time they are no longer aspirational and require another refresh.
Related resources
- Transforming assessment and feedback with technology
- Designing learning and assessment in a digital age
- QAA Hallmarks of Success Playbook: Assessment in digital and blended pedagogy is a useful guide to develop a shared understanding of assessment and feedback practices that are relevant to and support teaching and learning. It examines what success looks like in a digital and blended environment, barriers that may be encountered and how they can be overcome. The playbook can be used to drive discussions about assessment as learning, feedback and feedforward practices, as well as considering quality enhancement, moderation and academic integrity.
Footnotes
- 1 Reap's principles of good assessment and feedback (pdf) - www.reap.ac.uk/reap/public/papers/Principles_of_good_assessment_and_feed...
- 2 ESCAPEassessment_principles (pdf) - https://repository.jisc.ac.uk/6723/1/ESCAPEassessment_principles.pdf