An Assistant Dean, Learning and Teachings Role in Quality Assuring Assessment
المؤلف:
Sally Kift
المصدر:
Enhancing Teaching and Learning through Assessment
الجزء والصفحة:
P300-C26
2025-07-24
465
An Assistant Dean, Learning and Teaching's Role in Quality Assuring Assessment
In Australia, with the advent of the Australian Universities Quality Agency (AUQA) and 2005 Nelson reforms, the urgency that drives pedagogical policy development includes the obvious imperatives to satisfy quality audits, to manage accountability and risk, and to promote consistency and educational improvement.
However, in many time- and resource-poor faculties, the responsibility for operationalizing institutional learning, teaching and assessment agendas usually falls on a small number of committed individuals interposed between top-level university management structures on the one hand and, on the other, the often-crowded classroom and overburdened teacher. Depending on variables such as faculty culture, resourcing and faculty perception of priorities, this pivotal group may include officers such as Heads of School, Program Coordinators and Year/ Major Coordinators, but will always include the variously titled Deans or Associate/Assistant Deans (Learning & Teaching or Academic). The context and characteristics of these positions have received little analysis (cf. Lines, 2004), but what is clear is that it is these curriculum leaders who "act as the conduit, both ways, between the staff and the corporate plan" (Lines, 2004, p.44) and who therefore shoulder much of the responsibility for assuring quality assessment practices and their shackled stable-mate, the learning and teaching design, of which they are integrally a part.
In progressing and assuring the efficacy of desirable, authentic assessment, especially in the area of graduate attribute development and acquisition, the role of the Assistant Dean is to create the appropriate environment (strategic, policy-embedded and cultural) to assure that the nexus between institutional strategy and classroom implementation is facilitated. Implicit in this is the necessity both to ensure constructive alignment (Biggs, 2003) and program coherence as between program and individual subject objectives at the macro level and, in the subjects themselves, alignment as between subject objectives, learning and teaching approaches and the assessment tasks prescribed.
The challenges and possibilities of the Assistant Dean role will be discussed, particularly in terms of the necessity for this role to lead and manage change as a "complex learning and unlearning process for all concerned" (Scott, 2004). A simple conceptual framework for the role will be presented, illustrated with examples from my Faculty's policies and initiatives. The final part of the paper presents a Faculty case study on assessing graduate attributes in particularly problematic aspects, as an exemplar to illustrate the principle of quality assured assessment practices, facilitated under the auspices of this role.
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