Assessment in FYE Curriculum Design
Associate Professor Annah Healy
Project Manager, First Year Experience, Faculty of Education
Queensland University of Technology
Associate Professor Janet Taylor
Learning and Teaching Support Unit
University of Southern Queensland
It is probably accepted that assessment in Higher Education creates the stepping stones to graduation and must be acknowledged as a whole of course agenda (Boud, 2007; Sadler, 2007; Torrance, 2007). Assessment is a value-laden activity designed to prepare students for employment with a key focus on measuring the quality of their work. So what? Most academics would agree with the generic description, but this is not the issue. It is rather that, traditionally, unit developers create assessment on the basis of content to measure achievement. It is rarely designed in relation to the particular needs of first year students or consciously as one part of a more encompassing developmental process in which students are required to create and recreate their history in increasingly sophisticated ways. If assessment is conceived as a set of processes that measure the outcomes of student learning and provides a means of deciding if they are ready to proceed, feedback beyond a grade or mark must be central to developing assessment processes. So, what does this mean for the FYE?
First, the integration of learning and assessment within an intensively supported curriculum cycle seems crucial. Support intentionally builds student agency; it introducers multiple lenses on knowledge; it locates the ‘work’ within a graduate capabilities framework; it scaffolds analytic and reflective processes; and it models and supports tertiary literacies. Second, clarity in assessment procedures, processes and criteria is important for the short-term attainment of particular and limited objectives, but importantly recognises a place within longer-term goals. Third, what is assessed must go beyond the interpretation of knowledge; thinking, problem-solving and extrapolation capacities are equally a focus in effective assessment design and can be a key criteria for successful transition to university studies.
Associate Professor Annah Healy - Bio
Associate Professor Annah Healy, Project Manager, First Year Experience, Chair, Faculty of Education Teaching and Learning Committee, Faculty of Education Queensland University of Technology. Annah is widely published in the areas of pedagogy, new learning theory and multiliteracies. Her most recent publication in 2008, Multiliteracies and diversity in education: New pedagogies for expanding landscapes (Oxford), received the Botsman Award for significant contributions to innovative pedagogies and learning theory. As well as a Carrick Citation in 2007, Annah has received a number of awards for her contributions to teaching and learning from professional partner organisations. From 2007, she has been the project manager of FYE work in the Faculty of Education at QUT, designing first year curriculum to support students through, among other strategies, a teaching-team approach across semesters, linked assignment and tertiary literacies foci, FYE Principles to (good) Practice framework and an Assessment Repository to guide student assignment writing.
Regarding FYE, Annah’s research centres on curriculum design forteaching, learning and pedagogy with Critical Theory at its core. She supervises doctoral students, two of whom have received the QUT University prize for outstanding theses. She also supervises and teaches in postgraduate and undergraduate programs.
Associate Professor Janet Taylor - Bio
Janet Taylor, is currently Associate Professor and Coordinator of Academic Learning Skills within The Learning and Teaching Support Unit at The University of Southern Queensland. Janet has Masters and PhD degrees in zoology with a strong link with mathematical applications and a teaching qualification in mathematics education. She has worked in higher education for over 25 years and is a Fellow of HERDSA. In her 25 years in higher education she has enjoyed teaching and writing curriculum for mathematics and biology at four Australian universities; primarily at first year and in the last fifteen years for distance education. She has been the recipient of 3 national teaching development grants and have received a Carrick (now ALTC) Citation for outstanding contribution to student learning in an area which focuses on the development of students’ academic skills. She is widely published and is involved in current research projects investigating students’ learning experiences within the first year of study and the application of new technologies to learning. Her most recent publication of interest is a paper in the Journal of University Teaching and Learning Practice entitled ‘Assessment in first year university: a model to manage transition’
In late February 2009 Janet will take up the position of Professor and Director of Teaching and Learning at Southern Cross University, Lismore, NSW.
