5 - Support for staff
Professional development for staff on good assessment practice.
Tertiary teachers want and need assistance with the practice of assessment: How do TEOs ensure that academic staff use valid and reliable assessment tools? Are assessments being used that provide information to improve student learning? Most TEOs offer professional development workshops to staff, but these may not be sufficient (Hattie). Our research findings reveal that assessment concerns must be addressed at the highest level of policy, with clear statements on overarching purposes of assessment and guidance that help tertiary teachers achieve best practices.
Tertiary teachers need support and advice to practice both assessment of and for learning. The senior academic managers we interviewed indicated that their TEOs provided staff training in assessment, but the staff themselves indicated they needed more training and support in how to use assessments as tools to promote student learning. They were especially challenged in the design and use of creative and innovative assessments that would be particularly well-suited to diverse disciplines and professional programmes.
Case Studies from the Symposium:
One paper in the Symposium addressed how assessment can be configured to support productive student learning and focused on learning-oriented assessment as articulated by the Learning-Oriented Assessment Project (LOAP) at Hong Kong Institute of Education. The paper presented a framework for assessment task design to support student achievement through authentic assessments that are learning tasks aligned to curricular objectives. This paper reconciles formative and summative assessment by posing a set of principles that can be applied to both (Carless).