Many students currently graduate without appropriate skills in assessment.
Assessment serves many purposes, including:
• helping students improve their learning, and
• certifying their learning.
This website is about an important additional purpose for assessment.
It is about equipping students for the learning and assessing they will need to do after completing their course and the challenges they will face after graduation.
Broad structure of the website
This site provides information on:
• ideas and strategies to browse and consider, but no prescriptions for what you should do.
• ideas that are potentially applicable across a wide range of disciplinary areas.
• examples of how these ideas and strategies have already been used and tested.
• how to adapt and extend these ideas to suit your own subject matter and local circumstances.
Propositions for assessment reform
To read the ALTC report by David Boud and Associates (2010), Assessment 2020: Seven propositions for assessment reform in higher education, download pdf (4 pages).
For a Spanish translation of this documentEvaluación 2020. Siete propuestas para la reforma de la evaluación en la Educación Superior, download pdf.
Who is this Assessment Futures website for?
• Experienced teachers in higher education, who have completed some study in the area. (It is not a basic introduction to teaching and assessment.)
Assessment Futures is supported by theory and empirical evidence. For clarity this information is not foregrounded, but it can be accessed through hyperlinks to the various examples and to the references section of the site. Where evidence is partial or incomplete, the professional judgement of the author has been applied.
Research on assessment practice in Higher Education is limited and is often generated by a local problem or situation. It rarely tracks a major intervention or brings together different studies of the same thing. It tends to be suggestive and ambiguous. Implications are not always easily drawn from it.
If you have evidence that informs the practices described here, please contact us.