Improving the assessment of transferable skills in chemistry through evaluation of current practice

The development and assessment of transferable skills acquired by students, such as communication and teamwork, within undergraduate degrees is being increas-ingly emphasised. Many instructors have designed and implemented assessment tasks with the aim to provide students with opportunities to acquire and demon-strate these skills. We have now applied our previously published tool to evaluate whether assessment tasks allow students to demonstrate achievement of these transferable skills. The tool allows detailed evaluation of the alignment of any as-sessment item against the claimed set of learning outcomes. We present here two examples in which use of the tool provides evidence for the level of achievement of transferable skills and a further example of use of the tool to inform curricu-lum design and pedagogy, with the goal of increasing achievement of communi-cation and teamwork bench marks. Implications for practice in assessment design for learning are presented

Academic freedom, achievement standards and professional identity

The tension between the freedom of academics to grade the achievements of their students without interference or coercion and the prerogative of higher education institutions to control grading standards is often deliberated by weighing up the authority and rights of the two parties. An alternative approach is to start with an analysis of the characteristics necessary for a system to exhibit integrity in grading academic achievement and treat the establishment and maintenance of academic standards as a problem to be solved. This would allow the respective responsibilities of academics and institutions to be resolved within a concrete setting rather than in the abstract. Connecting the typical characteristics of a profession with Isaiah Berlin's two concepts of liberty leads to a productive partnership in which the respective interests of individual academics and the values of institutions can converge on a practical solution to the problem of academic freedom

Three in-course assessment reforms to improve higher education learning outcomes

A current international concern is that, for too large a proportion of graduates, their higher order cognitive and practical capabilities are below acceptable levels. The constituent courses of academic programmes are the most logical sites for developing these capabilities. Contributing to patchy attainment are deficiencies in three particular aspects of assessment practice: the design and specifications of many assessment tasks; the minimum requirements for awarding a passing grade in a course and granting credit towards the degree; and the accumulation of points derived from quizzes, assessments or activities completed during the teaching period. Rethinking and reforming these would lead to improvements for significant sub-populations of students. Pursuing such a goal would also have significant positive implications for academic teachers, but be contingent on favourable contextual settings including departmental and institutional priorities

Evaluation and the logic of recommendations

It is common practice to associate recommendations for program improvement with evaluation reports. In this article, several classes of recommendations are identified, and aspects of one class are explored in some detail. Consideration is given to certain logical, methodological, and practical issues relating to the derivation of recommendations that specify remedial actions. It is argued that formulating sets of such recommendations generally takes place in environments characterized by indeterminacy, a point that is not sufficiently recognized. The conclusion is reached that evaluation and radical program redesign probably ought to be kept separate

Fidelity as a precondition for integrity in grading academic achievement

If a grade is to be trusted as an authentic representation of a student’s level of academic achievement, one of the requirements is that all the elements that contribute to that grade must qualify as achievement, and not be something else. The implications of taking this proposition literally turn out to be far reaching. Many elements that are technically non‐achievements are routinely incorporated into grades and thereby act as contaminants. A variety of credits and penalties are often included with the intention of helping shape student behaviours or improve their learning. Reversing the situation has ramifications not only for assessment and grading practices but also for the ways in which curriculum and teaching are conceptualised, designed and engaged in

Academic achievement standards and quality assurance

Quality assurance processes have been applied to many aspects of higher education, including teaching, learning and assessment. At least in the latter domain, quality assurance needs its fundamental tenets critically scrutinised. A common but inadequate approach has been to identify and promote learning environment changes ‘likely to improve’ learning outcomes. They are simply labelled ‘quality assurance’ without establishing their effectiveness. Part of the problem is that the case for quality assurance has been largely taken as self-evident. Originally, quality assurance principles were developed in domains outside higher education. In those, auditable product, service and other standards play a central role. Although external processes do not directly transfer to higher education, their underlying principles offer perspectives and pointers for reconceptualising quality assurance and improving assessment and grading. Quality assurance should be grounded in authoritative and properly formulated academic achievement standards applied to actual student works, performances and course grades

Specifying and promulgating achievement standards

Assessment practices, both at the classroom level and for the award of certificates, have traditionally followed norm-referenced principles, although in recent years there has been an increasing interest in criterion-referenced assessment. In the first part of this article, another approach (referred to as standards-referenced assessment) is outlined. Sharing much of the motivation and philosophy of criterion-referenced assessment, it makes direct and extensive use of teachers’ qualitative judgments. In principle, standards-referenced assessment is applicable to a wide variety of school subjects, and attempts to provide external, visible standards for the use of both teachers and students. In the second part of the article, four methods of specifying and promulgating educational standards are identified and described. The four make use of numerical cut-offs, tacit knowledge, exemplars, and verbal descriptions. It is argued that the last two of these taken together provide the most promising framework for a standards-referenced assessment system within which teachers may make sound qualitative judgments about the achievements of their students both for improving learning and for summative reporting