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Assessment and Feedback Symposium 2022: Further Frontiers: Assessment and Feedback Policy and Practice at the Programme Level

Venue
Virtual, Zoom
County / Region
United Kingdom
Position on the Pathway
All categories
Fellowship Category
All Fellowship Categories
Event Type
Virtual Symposia
Focus
Teaching and Learning
Start Date
End Date
Duration
1 day
Institution Type
Higher Education
Price From
£295

Overview

In recent years, research and good-practice advice about assessment and feedback has continued to develop in higher education, although the pandemic provided significant new challenges – and opportunities for innovation. The pandemic also highlighted the importance of designing and planning assessment and feedback in relation to equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) issues, areas that have been considered in previous Advance HE symposia and publications (Baughan 2021). Latterly, some research has advocated for more compassionate approaches in assessment (McArthur, 2022). Thus, whilst assessment and feedback remain ongoing concerns in the sector, and there remain needs to develop and improve, there are resources and publications ‘out there’ to help practitioners – but a lack of time to consider and enact the advice may often be a barrier.

However, research and advice may not necessarily focus on designing and planning assessment and feedback at the wider programme or course level. The interested individual may use resources to improve individual assessments that they are responsible for, but our concerns need to be broader than this: what about planning at the institutional level, the faculty level, and the programme level? Assessment and feedback policy and practice needs to be ‘joined up’. Assessments should be devised in ways within programmes to ensure a coherent learning journey for students. Principles and practices such as assessment for learning, assessment and feedback literacy, and dialogic feedback need to be planned across programmes, rather than merely by individual enthusiasts, otherwise their benefits will be limited.

The 2022 Advance HE Assessment and Feedback Symposium will focus on assessment and feedback at the programme level and consider strategies that can be enacted for this. We also include here other ‘meso’ and ‘macro’ contexts such as faculty and institutional levels.

There is some previous work on these issues (for example, Elkington, 2021) and a recent conference at the University of Nottingham (2022) (see references below for link) was important in bringing such issues to the foreground. Also important here are the PASS project (University of Bradford – see references below) and the TESTA methodology (also listed below). We want to further highlight the importance of assessment and feedback at these broader levels and we invite you to contribute to this under-researched area.

Baughan, P. (Ed.) (2021). Assessment and Feedback in a Post-Pandemic Era: A Time for Learning and Inclusion. York, Advance HE. IBSN: 978-1-9163593-5-2. https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/assessment-and-feedback-post-pandemic-era-time-learning-and-inclusion

Elkington, S. (2021) Scaling-up Flexible Assessment. In Assessment and Feedback in a Post-Pandemic Era: A Time for Learning and Inclusion. York, Advance HE. IBSN: 978- 1-9163593-5-2. https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/assessment-and-feedback-post-pandemic-era-time-learning-and-inclusion

McArthur, J. (2022) Rethinking authentic assessment: work, well-being, and society. Higher Education DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-022-00822-y

Programme Assessment Strategies (PASS) Project, University of Bradford. https://www.bradford.ac.uk/pass/ Transforming the Experience of Students through Assessment (TESTA) https://www.testa.ac.uk

University of Nottingham (2022) Designing Programmes for Learning: Foundations and Aspirations – Conference. https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/educational-excellence/services/designing-programmes-for-learning-event.aspx 11-12 January.

Call for contributions

Colleagues are invited to submit an abstract for either a 20 minute Presentation or for a 40 minute Workshop, as detailed below.

Presentations – Colleagues are asked to submit an abstract of 150-200 words outlining the focus of the presentation and potential benefits to participants of attending. Presentations are 20 minutes long and are to be structured to include 15 minutes presentation time, leaving sufficient opportunity for audience questions.

Workshops – Those preferring a workshop format are asked to submit an abstract of 175-200 words. This should outline the focus of the workshop and, importantly, activities to be included. Please provide a title, an explanation of activities (one or more), participant ‘takeaways’ (i.e. what participants will gain from attending the workshop) and indicate how the workshop aligns to one or more of the Symposium themes. Workshops are 40 minutes long.

We would be especially keen to receive staff-student submissions, featuring staff and students facilitating papers or workshops together.

Reviewing criteria

All submissions (presentations and workshops) will be reviewed according to the following criteria.

  • Relevance to the symposium focus – considering assessment and / or feedback at the course, programme, school, faculty or institutional level.
  • Linkage to relevant assessment and feedback literature: submissions must draw on at least two to three items of literature.
  • Reference to relevant evidence-informed theories, frameworks or principles about assessment, feedback, and / or other relevant or connected areas.
  • Where appropriate, embedding of EDI issues in assessment and feedback processes and practices.

Submission deadline

The deadline for submissions is:  Friday 26 September 2022 at 13:00

More details about the symposium, including information about keynote speakers, will be published soon. We look forward to receiving your submission and hope to see many of you in Leeds.