Keynote: Ensuring assessment and feedback enables student learning - David Boud, Deakin University, Australia
Student assessment and feedback have continued to be the most criticised aspects of university courses around the world, despite persistent efforts to change. Acknowledging this uncomfortable fact raises the question of whether we are thinking about these ideas in productive ways. What does assessment and feedback for students need to do?
The presentation will focus on recent changes in thinking about assessment and feedback in higher education. It will explore the often-conflicting purposes of assessment and examine the implications of standards-based assessment in both assuring learning outcomes and in promoting learning. It will consider the role of authentic assessments that represent what graduates will do in the world and how students’ evaluative judgement can be developed so their learning can be sustained up to and beyond the point of graduation.
There has been a revolution in how feedback is conceptualised in the past eight years. It has involved a shift from seeing feedback primarily as an input to students, to a process in which students necessarily are involved throughout. The implications of this view for the design of courses and the relationship between assessment and feedback will be explored.