Professor David Boud, University of Technology Sydney, Australia

This Keynote examines theme 2: great designs for assessment.  Please view Prof Boud's keynote by clicking the link below.

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Overview: What constitutes a great rather than an ordinary design for assessment in higher education? What should assessment activities aim to achieve? The role of assessment is often so taken for granted that it is easy to lose sight of what assessment should influence. For too long criteria such as reliability, validity and conventional practicality have led to assessment practices that may be sufficient to satisfy colleagues, but are not particularly valuable for students. Not only may these practices not lead to further learning, but they may have consequences that lead to short-term thinking, inhibition of some kinds of learning and inappropriate dependency on teachers and assessors. The presentation argues that great designs for assessment must primarily be judged in terms of the effects they have on learning and that designs that meet narrow measurement criteria are necessarily inadequate. It identifies key features of such designs and opens up discussion about what assessment that satisfies these features might look like and how digital media might be used to realise them.

Session details

A chat session was held here in relation to these this keynotes on the 30th May from 08:00 - 09:00 UK time (BST). You may view a transcript of this chat from the link below.

 Chat transcript - Great designs: what should assessment do?

The discussion forum will be open throughout the conference, and can be accessed through the 'Join the discussion' link below.

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Use the 'Join the Discussion' link to view all the posts for this session. As a taster, below are the last 5 posts for this session's discussion fora.