Introduction
This page provides an overview of the symposia series and how you can get involved by submitting your contributions. To book your place, click on the following links:
- Assessment literacy: 8 March 2017
- Technology-enabled / electronically managed assessment: 12 April 2017
- Enhancing student engagement through assessment: 24 May 2017
UK Higher education is currently undergoing a period of significant challenge and transformation. It is likely that these challenges will, in a comparatively short period of time, lead to changes in the ways in which the student learning experience is, accessed, mediated, and assessed. Assessment will undoubtedly have an important part to play in supporting such change and will itself need to reflect this shifting environment. Yet, whilst assessment increasingly occupies a status of importance in higher education, it remains the area perhaps least effectively engaged by efforts at change. Managing change of any kind in higher education is challenging, being difficult to model, initiate and sustain. Engaging in a process of transformation in assessment can have a positive impact upon student learning, as well as on student satisfaction. It can help ensure that staff and students have a greater understanding of and confidence in, academic standards, making it a necessary focus for any stakeholders concerned with furthering or ascertaining learning.
To this end, the HEA’s Transforming Assessment in Higher Education symposia series aims to bring together cutting edge examples of effective efforts at sustainable and manageable change at programme, school/faculty/college and/or institutional-level with regards to assessment and feedback. Specifically, the one-day symposia series aligns with the themes emerging from the national HEA summit for Transforming Assessment in Higher Education (May, 2016), namely challenges pertaining to:
- Assessment literacy;
- Technology enabled/electronically managed assessment;
- Enhancing student engagement through assessment.
Aims of the series
Hosted at the Higher Education Academy in York, the aim of each one-day symposium is:
- to provide an open and supportive environment within which to share and discuss contemporary practice-based programmes and initiatives in these priority areas; and
- to begin to craft a principled, and evidence-informed, approach to devising subsequent support and guidance for chane(s) with regards to transforming assessment in higher education.
Call for contributions
The HEA welcomes submissions outlining discipline-specific innovations in devising and facilitating alternative approaches to assessment design, practice and administration within these broad themes, as well as examples detailing wider institutional initiatives aimed at strategic and systemic change. We would be particularly interested in examples of inter-disciplinary approaches, as well as examples that cross the boundaries of two or more of the three core themes.
In no more than 500 words, please position your case study against one of the three core themes above by identifying the following:
- Which of the core themes does your case study align with?
- What is the context of your study (discipline; generic issue; UG/PG; country(ies)?
- What is (are) the central issue(s) your case study responds to within this theme?
- What framework(s) have you used to help frame the issue?
- What is the approach/process you have undertaken in the case study?
- What are the findings?
- Can you outline the key messages from the work undertaken?
- How might the findings of the case study be transferred to other disciplines/levels?
- How could this work be developed further; what are the next steps?
NB: Please be sure to include in your submission full contact and affiliate details for all contributors.
Submission Deadline dates:
- Symposium 1: Assessment Literacy – February 10th 2017
- Symposium 2: Technology enabled/electronically managed assessment – March 3rd 2017
- Symposium 3: Enhancing student engagement through assessment – March 31st 2017
Submissions should be e-mailed to: assessment@heacademy.ac.uk
Successful presenters will be eligible for the reduced delegate fee of £180.
11 weeks
Assessment literacy
Symposium One – York, 8th March 2017
Assessment literacy as it is considered in this symposium encompasses: an appreciation of the relationship between assessment and learning; a conceptual (and theoretical) understanding of assessment; understanding of the nature and meaning of assessment criteria and standards; skills in self- and peer-assessment; familiarity with new and established assessment techniques; and the ability to select and apply appropriate approaches to assessment tasks; an understanding of attribution and plagiarism (Price et al. 2012).
Technology enabled/electronically managed assessment
Symposium Two – York, 12 April 2017
This symposium will consider innovative ways to improve the operational effectiveness, efficiencies and consistency of assessment processes through available technologies underpinned by sound pedagogies. This might include efforts towards electronic submission, marking and feedback, as well as investigation into the integration of systems (notably the institutional virtual learning environment and student record system).
Enhancing student engagement through assessment
Symposium Three – York, 24 May 2017
Student engagement is recognised here as a multi-dimensional concept. When applied to assessment these might include, for instance, strategies which focus on developing approaches to assessment and feedback which harness and foster: students’ enthusiasm for and enjoyment of active involvement with subject content; learners’ active participation in evaluating and directing the processes of their own learning; and student participation in the governance and (co)construction of assessment.
Outputs and publications
For those whose case studies have been selected for the symposia there will be further opportunities for the work to be considered for a HEA Transforming Assessment case studies series resource to be made available to the sector in late 2017. Those selected for the case studies series will be notified by the end of May 2017. Furthermore, a selected range of successful submissions will be invited to develop full articles for a special issue of the Higher Education Pedagogies Journal for release in early 2018 subject to approval via the HEP journal peer review process. Editors: Carol Evans and Sam Elkington.
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