Professor Dai Hounsell
Assessing the 21st-century Graduate: Seven Challenges
The aim of this keynote will be to explore some 'shoe-pinching' challenges in developing assessment practices in higher education fit for 21st-century purposes. Addressing these challenges will entail significant shifts of emphasis away from, for example, students as lone student assessees; from fixed-time/fixed-place/fixed-question assessments; from an almost exclusive focus on assignments as 'finished' products; from passive after-the-fact feedback; from communication as writing for the tutor-as-reader; from highly stipulative, closed-choice assessments; and from set-standard assessments based on teacher-defined learning outcomes. These shifts of emphasis will be challenging not just because they call for new assessment designs but because they also throw down the gauntlet to some long-cherished assumptions about what counts as high-quality, rigorous assessment.
About Professor Hounsell
Dai Hounsell is Vice Principal for Academic Enhancement at the University of Edinburgh, where he is also Professor of Higher Education, His current teaching responsibilities include a master's course in online assessment. He has published widely on student and staff experiences of learning, teaching and assessment in higher education, has led various multi-university research and development projects in these fields, and has been an adviser to universities and higher education organisations in Sweden, Norway, Australia and South Africa as well as in the UK. In 2007 he was awarded a Fellowship of the Society for Research into Higher Education. Since 2008 he has been Honorary Visiting Professor at Glasgow Caledonian University.
Professor Hounsell's Keynote is kindly sponsored by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council.
To request a copy of the slides from this Keynote Presentation at the ATN Assessment Confrerence 18 November 2010:
Assessing the 21st-century Graduate: Seven Challenges (some images removed) [pdf - 4.5MB]
Please contact us via email at: atn.assessment@uts.edu.au
Professor David Boud
Sustainable Assessment for Long-term Learning
Assessment is a powerful influence on learning. Assessment tasks shape what students regard as important, how they study and what they learn. They equip students with the knowledge, skills and dispositions they carry with them after graduation. How can assessment be designed and organized to have a positive influence on learning beyond the time frame of the course? How can we avoid inadvertently limiting actual study to those things that are least important in the longer-term? What is most important to build in to assessment tasks and how they are situated to ensure they have a useful influence?
Download a copy of the slides from this Keynote Presentation at the ATN Assessment Conference 19 November 2010:
Sustainable Assessment for Long-term Learning (images removed) [pdf - 429 KB]
About Professor Boud
David Boud is Professor of Adult Education in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney. He has been involved in research and teaching development in adult, higher and professional education for over 30 years and has contributed extensively to the literature. Previously he held the positions of Dean of the University Graduate School, Head of the School of Adult and Language Education and Associate Dean (Research and Development) in the Faculty of Education. Prior to his appointment at UTS he was Professor and Foundation Director of the Professional Development Centre at the University of New South Wales. He is a 2007 Australian Learning and Teaching Council Senior Fellow and in 2010 completed the project associated with this 'Student assessment for learning in and after courses'. See Assessment Futures.
Professor Keithia Wilson and Associate Professor Alf Lizzio
Assessment in First-Year: Staff and Student Perceptions of Appropriate and Effective Practice
The challenges of increasing student diversity in higher education require us to critically examine the assumptions that inform our assessment practices with commencing students. This session will report the findings of an Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC) funded study of assessment practices with commencing students from a range of disciplines. The 'first-year assessment system' is investigated from the perspectives of both commencing students and academic and professional staff. The dimensions that commencing students use to appraise or make sense of assessment tasks are identified and their influence on engagement and learning explored. Similarly, academic staff conceptions of the purposes of early assessment and their perceived role in managing and motivating students' engagement with assessment are clarified. Findings are conceptualised in terms of a framework for enabling students through the assessment process.
Download a copy of the slides from this Keynote Presentation at the ATN Assessment Conference 19 November 2010:
Assessment in First Year: Beliefs, Practices and Systems (images removed) [pdf - 23.2MB]
About Professor Wilson
Keithia Wilson is a Professor of Psychology at Griffith University, Senior Fellow, First-Year Experience at the Griffith Institute for Higher Education and Program Director, First Year Experience in Griffith Health. Professor Wilson received the Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC) Prime Minister's Award for the 2007 Australian University Teacher of the Year. She is currently an ALTC National Fellow undertaking a project developing an integrated whole-of-school approach to supporting the transition and success of diverse commencing student cohorts across their first year of study.
About Associate Professor Lizzio
Alf Lizzio is an Associate Professor and Head of the School of Psychology at Griffith University. He has fulfilled a range of departmental and faculty-level academic leadership roles, and has led university-wide projects focusing on the first-year experience, student retention, sessional teaching, and graduate capability. He publishes widely in international journals on topics relevant to higher education such as peer-learning, course design and assessment practices. He is currently a co-chief investigator on two Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC) grants on program leadership and assessment practices. He is also a chief investigator on an Australian Research Council (ARC) funded project on student leadership. He was the 2008 recipient of the ALTC Award for Teaching Excellence (Social Sciences) and the leader of the Succeeding@Griffith project which received an ALTC Program Excellence Award in 2009.
