Inclusive assessment and feedback

Inclusive assessment and feedback: enhancing our understanding and practice via collaborative research.

During the last eighteen months, colleagues from across the University, including staff in the Learning and Teaching Hub, and our Evaluation and Policy Department, have been partnering with other University Alliance institutions on two QAA Collaborative Enhancement projects investigating aspects of inclusive assessment. Both projects have supported our wider commitment to inclusive practice (as outlined in a previous blog post) and to developing assessment and feedback literacy for staff and students. Developments include a refreshed Assessment and Feedback policy, the work on a new approach to marking criteria and a review of our guidance on assessment equivalencies. Details on those initiatives can be found on the assessment section of the Learning and Teaching Hub pages [institutional login required].

The projects:

The Embedding Inclusive Assessment project, led by colleagues at the University of Teesside, was a collaboration of eight institutions, driven by an interest in exploring the impacts of large-scale changes made to policy and practice at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and the subsequent pivot to remote teaching. The starting point was to identify courses which had seen a reduction in awarding gaps and continuation rates. We then investigated – via qualitative research with staff and students – student and staff experiences of inclusive assessment and conducted a thematic analysis. The data were used to inform a series of project outputs, which can be accessed via the QAA-hosted project website, including:

• A set of inclusive assessment design attributes
• A toolkit, which provides guidance on how institutional leaders, staff and students can reflect on, discuss and use the attributes to enhance practice.
• A series of case studies drawn from across all participating institutions.

Figure: Inclusive Assessment Attributes from the QAA website

The Making the language of assessment inclusive project sought to build on existing work on the lack of clarity around marking criteria (between staff as well as between staff and students) as well as research into dialogic approaches to enhancing student assessment and feedback literacy (e.g. Carless & Boud, 2018). The project team (led by colleagues at the University of the West of England) were keen to investigate the ‘mysterious quotient’ of key terms encountered by students during their assessment and feedback journey. The stages of the project included:

• A linguistic analysis of assessment-related documents, to identify common problematic terms (such as ‘critically evaluate’)
• A student and staff survey to investigate confidence levels when encountering these terms
• Focus groups with staff and students to explore more deeply the kinds of issues students encounter in deciphering the language of assessment.

Findings led to the development of a toolkit, structured according to the assessment and feedback ‘lifecycle’ and focusing on opportunities for dialogue at each stage. The toolkit consists of a series of questions designed to prompt, for instance, reflection on assessment design (staff) and engaging with assessment briefs (students). It can be used by individual staff, across module teams to support calibration activities and to design dialogic activities with students to help them better engage with feedback.

Key to both projects was the element of student partnership, and we would like to thank our – then – PhD student (and now lecturer in our School of Humanities and Social Science) Dr. Jason Preston for his work across both of these projects.

For more details on these projects, advice on how to use the toolkits within your teams and/or with your students, and all of the enhancements to our assessment processes at the University of Brighton, please contact Juliet Eve, Head of the Learning and Teaching Hub, email: J.Eve@brighton.ac.uk