Can Intrinsic Graduate Qualities be Developed Through Assessment? Mapping Assessment Practices in IT Degree Programs
المؤلف:
Sue Gelade & Frank Fursenko
المصدر:
Enhancing Teaching and Learning through Assessment
الجزء والصفحة:
P477-C40
2025-08-28
321
Can Intrinsic Graduate Qualities be Developed Through Assessment? Mapping Assessment Practices in IT Degree Programs
Higher education in Australia is operating in a climate of increasing accountability. The building of key discipline skills which help to set a student on a career path along with those interrelated skills, called graduate attributes or qualities, therefore has become crucial to both the students and to their university. In universities, graduate qualities are a useful framework within which discipline knowledge and the more intrinsic personal qualities students need to gain or consolidate during their degree program can be developed. Indeed, such intrinsic qualities embedded in the teaching of most disciplines' teaching should go beyond the life of any chosen field, having 'the potential to outlast the knowledge and contexts in which they were originally acquired' (University of Sydney 2003).
At the University of South Australia, our graduate qualities have been clearly defined, and in the process of obtaining their degree, it is expected that a graduate:
• Operates effectively with and upon a body of knowledge of sufficient depth to begin professional practice;
• Is prepared for lifelong learning in pursuit of personal development and excellence in professional practice;
• Is an effective problem solver capable of applying logical, critical and creative thinking to a range of problems;
• Can work autonomously and collaboratively as a professional;
• Is committed to ethical action and social responsibility as a professional and citizen;
• Communicates effectively in professional practice and as a member of the community;
• Demonstrates international perspectives as a professional and as a citizen.
Among academics, there is general agreement that students will acquire their discipline knowledge through the teaching and learning that occurs throughout a degree program. Assessment is the obvious means by which teaching staff know whether students have gained their required levels of knowledge. However, it is often less of a certainty for university educators as to how students can be assessed for other, intrinsic graduate qualities they are also expected to have acquired. This issue becomes even more problematic for staff who are designing tasks for culturally or geographically diverse groups of students who may rarely be encountered face to face.
For a number of staff within the School of Computer Sciences (CIS) at the University of South Australia, the lack of a coherent understanding about assessing graduate qualities was coupled with some concern about off-shore (from Australia) delivery of degree programs. There was an awareness that cultural differences and hidden assumptions on the part of course designers might impact on student attainment across the diversity of delivery.
This project was initiated in an effort to address the issue of mark disparity, and to find out more fully how students might be gaining their various graduate qualities. The project was planned to encompass assessment in relation to a particular program offered across 3 different localities: Australia, Hong Kong and Malaysia. Our team consisted of four computing academics, one professional development academic and a dean of teaching and learning. In its broadest terms, the project aimed to provide:
An information base that would assist course developers to understand how their students' learning could be addressed so as to produce the university's graduate qualities through the use of their assessment tasks;
A wider understanding of assessment design and how that can be formulated to be delivered similarly across differing geographic and cultural contexts but within culturally appropriate parameters addressing all students' learning needs;
A model from which other programs in an international context might be designed to support graduate qualities and their linkages to assessment and learning.
Given such broad aims, we initially decided to focus mainly on developing a mapping tool and then using it to produce an overview of the programs' assessment tasks in three ways:
• The outcomes required
• Their relationship to graduate qualities and
• What, if any, assumptions of knowledge were implicit in the setting of the tasks
We expected that the mapping exercise would reveal cross cultural factors that might account for observed differences in grade distributions. A project officer would be added to the team when the mapping was undertaken.
الاكثر قراءة في Teaching Strategies
اخر الاخبار
اخبار العتبة العباسية المقدسة
