An assessment framework: some background and a sales spiel
المؤلف:
Sally Kift
المصدر:
Enhancing Teaching and Learning through Assessment
الجزء والصفحة:
P306-C26
2025-07-25
445
An assessment framework: some background and a sales spiel
As the concept of curriculum alignment was not necessarily on the radar of discipline colleagues, as with most new learning, it was therefore considered desirable to contextualize the issue to the Faculty learning environments and to provide adaptable schema to support teachers in the deployment of new curriculum approaches. Of course, as has been acknowledged above, the role of any assessment will depend on the learning outcomes identified and pursued for a given course of study. With some guidance, colleagues were soon able to identify that, at a fundamental level of subject design, the type of information that might facilitate the efficacy of assessment tasks, and which should be communicated to students, could be suggested by the following headings, all of which are directed at the necessity to be explicit about the skills outcomes to be attained in course documentation (Kift, 2002):
• State the skill(s) to be explicitly and implicitly developed in the subject;
• Why these skill(s) have been chosen for this subject;
• What is the learning outcome in relation to the particular skill(s)?;
• How will each of the skill(s) be developed in the subject?; and
• How does this subject's skill(s)' development relate to the year's curriculum as a whole and then to the program of study as a whole?
Equally as important as painting the big picture for students was determined to be the issue of explaining to learners each item of assessment in terms of, for example, what the skills outcomes for the particular assessment task were expected to be, and how such outcomes linked with those of the particular subject of study and with other subjects being studied by the student, so that students were presented with "a theoretically grounded and integrated approach to assessment" (Johnstone & Vignaendra, 2003, pp.383 388).
Crucial to garnering support for the validity of this curriculum renewal in the discipline context, the recent Australian Universities Teaching Committee's (AUTC) "stocktake" of legal education, Learning Outcomes and Curriculum Development in Law (Johnstone & Vignaendra, 2003), which examined the impact of a variety of teaching methods offered within the discipline of law in Australian universities and sought to identify good practice in teaching and learning (Johnstone & Vignaendra, 2003, p.363), helpfully drew attention to the fact that:
It is now well accepted that assessment is one of the most important elements of subject design (Johnstone, Patterson and Rubenstein, 1998; Hinett and Bone, 2002). Assessment has changed in law schools, partly driven by university requirements, and partly by greater understanding of how good assessment strategies can influence student learning....The view of assessment in the traditional model of law teaching a single end of year written examination after "teaching" was completed no longer dominates law schools as much as it did in the past. This, in part, is due to a more thoughtful approach of some law teaching academics, and in part to the "top down" influence of university teaching and learning policies.
Also mentioned in the AUTC 2003 Report (Johnstone & Vignaendra, 2003, pp.390-391) is that this more sophisticated approach to assessment has produced other "notable improvement(s) to law school assessment regimes" including:
• the diversification of assessment methods;
• dissemination of information to students about assessment criteria; and
• greater attention to providing feedback to students on their performance against those criteria.
With the Faculty's agreement then, the project team considered that all of these matters should be reflected in any assessment framework designed for quality assurance purposes. The shared discussion and new learnings around the development of the framework are another significant outcome of the project.
The balance will now consider the detail of the assessment framework as ultimately refined and utilized, which readers might find of value as a tool to aid in progressing the assessment-as-learning agenda.
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