Operational Information:
The Faculty Assessment Guidelines contain four guidelines concerning:
- Word counts for units by degree type;
- Number and weight of items for assessment;
- Assessment due dates within a course;
- The value of words in assessment tasks.
The
Faculty Assessment Task Word Count Guidelines contain three guidelines that address:
- Tolerances for assessment task word counts;
- What parts of an assessment task "count" as part of the word count, and
- Penalties for exceeding the word limit.
Background
The Faculty’s Assessment policy draws on the research literature surrounding assessment, assuring a sound theoretical foundation. The policy is consistent with University policy and guidelines. Clear and workable guidelines for operationalisation accompany the policy. The policy development has involved members of the Faculty in a process, starting in 2002 with a Teaching and Learning Development Grant, to ensure sense of shared ownership. In 2002, Faculty members saw the creation of a Faculty-wide set of policy guidelines as an urgent priority, particularly as a means of establishing consistency between and across programs. It was suggested that the policy documents should contain statements of necessary actions and accountabilities leading to clarification of practices. Development of this policy has included (i) a systematic evaluation of the Faculty’s assessment practices, with a view to recommending changes to improve the aptness of assessment tasks to students as developing teachers and related professionals and the developmental coherence of the totality of a given program’s assessment tasks, (ii) a review of the literature on tertiary assessment practices (see below), and (iii) incorporation of recommendations of recent course reviews within the Faculty. Five guiding principles for assessment in the Faculty of Education have been derived from these three sources.
Guiding principles for assessment in the Faculty of Education
- Assessment should be transparent and consistent
- Assessment should be an aid to learning
- Unit assessment should reflect the place of the unit in the course and the expected developmental stage of the student
- Assessment should be linked to the learning outcomes and purpose of the unit, the course and to generic graduate attributes
- Assessment for any unit should serve both summative and formative purposes
Further detail about the sources that underlie these principles is set out in the two sections below and from course review recommendations on assessment.
Issues identified by the Faculty
The policy takes account of the following issues identified by Faculty members.
- Assessment should be linked to the learning outcomes and purpose of the program, including professional standards, and to generic graduate attributes
- Unit assessment should reflect the place of the unit in the program and the expected developmental stage of the student
- Assessment workloads should be consistent with the weighting of the unit
- Assessment should be transparent and consistent
- Assessment has a formative role and appropriate, timely feedback to students is critical for their learning
- Rich tasks that assess learning outcomes of a number of modules and/or units can be effective.
Principles for tertiary assessment
As well, the policy is based on four principles that emerged from a review of literature on tertiary assessment alternatives that formed part of the Faculty’s 2002 Teaching and Learning Development Grant. These principles, which encompass most of the issues identified by the Faculty, are:
- Assessment for any unit should serve both summative and formative purposes, and both of these should be described. The purpose of summative assessment is classification and prediction. It focuses on outcome, standard and comparison with benchmarks/criteria. The purpose of formative assessment is to show how a student's work can be improved. It is diagnostic in nature since it focuses on why an outcome was obtained, rather than the standard of outcome. An assessment item may be formative or summative, or both.
- Assessment should be linked with the objectives for the unit of work. This objectives-assessment link is an obvious outcome of the assessment tasks being developed with the goal of determining the extent to which students have achieved the objectives.
- Assessment approaches should be consistent with teaching strategies. For example, it would normally be inappropriate to assess learning that resulted from a series of traditional lectures by using a final examination that focussed on problem solving.
- The assessment strategy used within any unit should serve the following functions. It should be an aid to learning by:
Prescribing tasks which may require students to apply knowledge acquired in a course, read widely, report upon practical situations, demonstrate certain skills, analyse a problem or present an intellectually sound argument.
- Giving a sense of direction and motivation to students' work programs
- Providing regular feedback to students on their performances relative to pre-specified criteria so that specific weaknesses, errors and misunderstandings may be noted and overcome through remediation
- Creating constructive dialogue between lecturers and students
- Contributing to students' self-knowledge
- Giving information on assessed work to encourage students to identify strengths, and to acknowledge effort and originality of thought Providing information to students which assists them in the selection of paths for further study.
It should be an aid to progression processes and assuring the quality of Faculty teaching by:
- determining the level of achievement for students enrolled in each unit
- enabling the University to certify that the grade awarded corresponds with the student's performance and that the student has met the course assessment requirements on her/his own merits and in an approved manner
- providing information to assist in the continuing and periodic evaluation of course objectives, content, teaching methods and procedures.
Development of the Faculty Assessment Policy
The Faculty Teaching and Learning Committee Assessment Policy sub-committee identified aspects of assessment at each stage from developing a course through assessing in a unit, unit grading and the assessors meeting at the end of the semester. They further identified requirements of an assessment policy at each of these stages, taking account of the University guidelines that apply to each of these stages.
