Innovative Assessment in Higher Education

A Handbook for Academic Practitioners

Cordelia Bryan, Karen Clegg, Cordelia Bryan, Karen Clegg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138581180
• eBook ISBN: 9780429015564
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Contextualising why assessment is still the single most important factor affecting student learning in higher education, this second edition of Innovative Assessment in Higher Education: A Handbook for Academic Practitioners offers a critical discourse about the value of assessment for learning alongside practical suggestions about how to enhance the student experience of assessment and feedback.

With 17 new chapters this edition:

• contextualises assessment within the current higher education landscape;
• explores how student, parent and government expectations impact on assessment design;
• presents case studies on how to develop, incorporate and assess employability skills;
• reviews how technology and social media can be used to enhance assessment and feedback;
• provides examples and critical review of the use and development of feedback practices and how to assess professional, creative and performance-based subjects;
• offers guidance on how to develop assessment that is inclusive and enables all students to advance their potential.

Bridging the gap between theory and the practical elements of assessment, Innovative Assessment in Higher Education: A Handbook for Academic Practitioners is an essential resource for busy academics looking to make a tangible difference to their academic practice and their students' learning. This practical and accessible guide will aid both new and more experienced practitioners looking to learn more about how and why assessment in higher education can make such a difference to student learning.

Part I

Assessment in context

1Stepping back to move forward

The wider context of assessment in higher education

Helen King

Introduction

Assessment, as considered further in this book, is an integral part of effective curriculum design and development within modules and across programmes. However, it is also influenced by the wider local, national and, to an extent, international education policy context. This chapter explores some aspects of this wider context and considers the implications for you and your learning, teaching and assessment practices.

When I began teaching in higher education in England in the mid-1990s, assessment was almost entirely in the control of the individual lecturer. For universities, there was little scrutiny from elsewhere in the institution and certainly not from any external agency. The benefit of this was that lecturers had the opportunity to be more agile in designing and changing assessments. The major disadvantages included potential inconsistency in standards, little sharing of good practice or understanding of the pedagogic value of good assessment practice. In my experience as a student, a few years prior to this, assessment only had one purpose: to test your knowledge. There was no formative assessment and very little, if any, feedback beyond the mark. The picture was a little different for polytechnics and other similar institutions where the Council of National Academic Awards was the national degree-awarding authority until they were granted university status post-1992, and there were a range of innovative formative and summative assessments in use.

Now the higher education landscape is vastly different and we are in an era of massification, marketisation and regulation. The opportunities for individual lecturers to teach and assess in isolation are few and far between, and increasingly undesirable as pedagogical research and good practice demonstrate the value of coherent, consistent and collaborative approaches to assessment for learning. Furthermore, international travel, global communications and transnational education have transformed the opportunities for learning from other higher education systems, as exemplified in the biennial Assessment in Higher Education conference which, in 2018, attracted delegates from 26 countries.

Quality, standards and regulation

Over the past 20 years or so, higher education has had an increasing policy and public profile in relation to funding, expansion and academic standards. Changes in socioeconomic factors and the implementation of outcomes from the 1963 Robbins Report on Higher Education (Robbins, 1963) led to an increase in overall participation in higher education from 1.8% in 1940 to 32% in 1995 (Dearing, 1997, Report 6 Table 1.1). In 1920, 4357 students obtained a first degree; by 1960 this had increased to 22,426 and to 77,163 by 1990 (Bolton, 2012). Graduates in the 2016/17 academic year numbered 491,170 (HESA, 2018).

The Quality Assurance Agency and academic standards

In 1997, the National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education published its report (known as the Dearing Report after the Committee’s Chair), including 93 recommendations, commissioned in response to this increasing expansion and underfunding of the system (Dearing, 1997). This report gave the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) the remit of providing assurance on standards and quality. From this it developed a higher education qualifications framework (aligned to the Framework for Qualifications of the European Higher Education Area; Bologna Working Group 2005), a code of practice and subject benchmark statements, pool of external examiners and process of institutional audit. Over time, these policies and processes have evolved to the current UK Quality Code for Higher Education and systems of review and enhancement for higher education providers. These systems vary across the devolved administrations of the UK with the Annual Provider Review in England, Quality Enhancement Review in Wales and the Quality Enhancement Framework in Scotland. The 2018 version of the Quality Code is a succinct summary of the standards and quality that higher education providers are expected to meet, and these standards underpin the associated conditions for registrations with the regulator of English higher education providers, the Office for Students.

Table 1.1The UK Quality Code (March 2018)

Expectations for standards	Expectations for quality
The academic standards of courses meet the requirements of the relevant national qualifications framework.	Courses are well-designed, provide a high-quality academic experience for all students and enable a student’s achievement to be reliably assessed.
The value of qualifications awarded to students at the point of qualification and over time is in line with sector-recognised standards.	From admission through to completion, all students are provided with the support that they need to succeed in and benefit from higher education.

The Code identifies core and common practices which represent effective ways of working and underpin the means to meet these expectations. These expectations and practices are set at the level of the higher education provider, rather than being the direct responsibility of individual members of staff. In order to support and enable its staff to contribute to the maintenance of standards and quality, each higher education provider will have its own internal processes that ensure alignment to and compliance with the Quality Code.

Many countries globally now have a formal system of quality assurance. For example, all European countries have introduced or are introducing quality assurance approaches that align to the agreed Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area (ENQA, 2009); Australia has its Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency and, in the USA, the federal Department of Education recognises a number of regional and national accreditation agencies).

Given that these responsibilities are held at provider level, what are the implications for you as a teacher (and assessor) in higher education? Many institutions will have a dedicated quality team to manage and support processes which ensure adherence to the Quality Code. These processes are likely to include annual monitoring and periodic review of modules and programmes, and a system to approve minor and major changes to modules or programmes. With so many individual members of staff often involved in the design, teaching and assessment, it is important to have a clear system for keeping track across programmes to ensure internal coherence and consistency, as well as maintenance of standards in line with national expectations. In addition, many practice-oriented programmes are accredited by professional, statutory and regulatory bodies and your local quality processes will also support meeting their expectations.

The use of external expertise (external examiners and reviewers) is an essential component of quality assurance. As well as offering perspectives on the expectation of standards in a particular subject area, these external colleagues can also bring and share examples of good practice on learning, teaching and assessment. Being an external examiner (of existing programmes) or reviewer (for new programme development) is also an excellent professional development opportunity as it exposes you to different types of higher education provider and different ways of working. Those new to external examining may find it useful to engage in training and in 2017/18, the Higher Education Academy (now AdvanceHE) was commissioned by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) to develop a general course for new external examiners to support consistency across the sector (AdvanceHE, 2018a).

Local quality systems (including your responsibility for the implementation of good practice in assessment and feedback) will also need to provide support to address the issue of grade inflation: as higher education has expanded there has been a corresponding increase in the relative proportion of upper-second and first-class degrees awarded. This issue has been researched extensively in the USA, where the literature identifies factors such as student module evaluation and the need to improve recruitment on certain programmes as potential drivers (Bachan, 2015). In its first letter of strategic guidance to the Office for Students (Gyimah,2018), the new regulator of higher education in the UK, the government highlights grade inflation as a priority for monitoring, and related data form a supplementary metric in the Teaching and Student Outcomes Excellence Framework (Office for Students, 2019b).

Scholarship and good practice

A key feature of the post-Dearing policy landscape was considerable government investment in learning and teaching enhancement, and raising the profile of professional development, reward and recognition. In England, the Teaching Quality Enhancement Fund invested £181 million over the period 1999–2000 to 2004–05 to support three strands of work: institutional, through the development and implementation of learning and teaching strategies, academic subjects/disciplines – including through the Learning and Teaching Support Network (LTSN) Subject Centres and the Fund for the Development of Teaching and Learning (FDTL), and individual (National Teaching Fellowship Scheme; HEFCE, 2005). Subsequent investment included the emergence of the Higher Education Academy from the Institute of Learning and Teaching in Higher Education and LTSN, and the £315 million made available from 2005–06 to 2009–10 for Centres for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (HEFCE, 2011).

The impact of this investment is still clearly in evidence today including the ubiquity of learning and teaching strategies, development programmes for new lecturers and support for ongoing curriculum and professional development; the continuation of the Higher Education Academy’s work (including over 100,000 Fellows); sector-led initiatives such as the development of the UK Professional Standards Framework (AdvanceHE, 2018b)); institutional funding for learning and teaching projects; collaborative activities across the sector; and the ongoing presence of assessment-related projects hosting a wealth of resource such as:

• Assessment Standards Knowledge Exchange (Oxford Brookes University);
• TESTA;
• resources maintained and developed by Advance HE.

Internationally, there has also been interest in enhancing learning and teaching. For example, over the first decade of this century, the Australian government has invested in large-scale projects and individual awards for teaching excellence (Department of Education and Training, 2017); since 1986 the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education in Canada has partnered with 3M to award a total of over 300 National Teaching Fellowships (STLHE, 2019). Most recently, the European University Association (2019) Learning and Teaching initiative has brought together a large number of institutions across Europe to support the exchange of good practice. Assessment-related resources from these institutions include:

• Feedback for Learning: Closing the Assessment Loop (Monash University, 2018)
• Assessment Design Decisions Framework (Bearman et al, 2014)

Through an enormous variety of local, national and international initiatives, as well as the endeavours of individuals and groups, research, scholarship and the development and sharing of good practice and resources in relation to assessment are widespread and there is even a well-established (since 1975) peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the topic: Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education.

Tuition fees, widening participation and the higher education marketplace

Another key response to the Dearing (1997) report was the introduction of tuition fees for all UK students through the Teaching and Higher Education Act 1998. Following devolution in 1999, Scotland and Wales bought in their own legislation on tuition fees. Introducing fees meant that the government could reduce the block grant provided to higher education providers, thereby reducing the cost to the public purse. Changing the funding policy enabled opportunities for further expansion and widening participation to allow greater numbers of young people to access higher education and to increase the proportion from under-represented groups (such as those from lower income families, people with disabilities and ethnic minorities). A number of initiatives were instigated to support the outreach, information and guidance, induction, retention and employability issues associated with widening participation (Moore et al, 2013). These have led to a wealth of inclusivity-themed resources, guidance and literature to support institu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsement
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: How innovative are we?
• Part I Assessment in context
• Part II Implementing feedback
• Part III Stimulating learning
• Part IV Assessing professional development
• Index