Program - day 1 workshop 3

All those who wish to explore assessment practices in higher education.

David Boud is Professor of Adult Education at the University of Technology, Sydney and is currently engaged in a Senior Fellowship with the Australian Learning and Teaching Council focused on assessment for learning beyond the course.

Considerable investment has been made over many years in grading. What has been lacking is a concern about the impact of assessment on learning especially in the longer term. Formative assessment is not sufficiently oriented to learning beyond graduation (Boud, 2000) and the practice of assessment in higher education needs to be reconceptualised around the notion of informing learners' judgement (Boud & Falchikov, 2007). The risks of relying on summative assessment as a quality measure are too great and the risk of judging poorly performing students as adequate needs to be managed by a shift of the balance of assessment away from summative processes towards those that build student capacity for further learning and assessment. The kinds of assessment practices that can foster the development of student capability to judge their own learning and that of others will be discussed and key features examined. These include the active engagement of students in assessments, students giving and receiving feedback, use of modeling and practice, enhanced collaboration with peers, using features of authenticity, focusing on self-regulation and reflexivity, integration across courses and programs and direct involvement of students in design of assessment activities. These are all designed to contribute positively to students' experience.

Following a brief presentation of key ideas, the workshop will engage participants through activities that will include one or more of the following: generating criteria for judging assessment tasks that build student capacity, identifying changes that need to be made in their own assessment practices to orient them towards future learning outcomes, exploring ways of communicating the new assessment agenda to students and colleagues and designing assessment practices likely to be effective in their own courses. Use will be made of www.assessmentfutures.com

Boud, D. (2000). Sustainable assessment: rethinking assessment for the learning society. Studies in Continuing Education, 22, 2, 151-167.

Boud, D. & Falchikov, N. (Eds.) (2007). Rethinking Assessment for Higher Education: Learning for the Longer Term. London: Routledge, 181-197.