This Assessment and Feedback series showcases an enormously rich and useful series of blog posts on diverse aspects of assessment. The difficult task of pulling these together into five future directions is a particularly helpful way of harnessing these different insights into practical future insight. My overall impression is that these blog posts highlight the complexity of the issues facing us when we seek to improve both our assessment practices, and those of our students. The need to respond to the perceived problems identified by the NSS is clearly a keen driver or engagement with ideas about changing assessment practices. The challenge we face is to try to resist diving off in multiple directions that may or may not lead to a coherent assessment design. The emphasis on programme-level design is therefore particularly welcome. However, we must acknowledge that this is more than an assessment issue. Designing and successfully implementing programme-level assessment design requires considerable trust, generosity and curiosity among all academics and professional services staff involved. These personal qualities are often under-estimated when we consider major assessment redesign and reform. To be effective, there is also a need for time and space to think the design through; but time and intellectual space feel rather scarce in the modern academy. A second issue that requires direct attention when working towards such important assessment reform is the tension between holistic understandings of assessment and what I tend to call (perhaps a little unkindly) micro-management. I was particularly impressed with the blog posts that focused on the need for students to have a more authentic role in their own assessment experiences. We need to teach about assessment, and how it supports learning, and we must find time for this in our busy curricula and timetables. But I am not talking about the mechanics of assessment. I believe we need to spend more time talking with students about the aspirational purposes of assessment. I consider all academic work as fundamentally about engagement with the minds of others. We read, we observe, we make, we discuss – and all this is about the engagement with the minds of other. And this is a colourful, dynamic, creative and unpredictable space. I wonder if there is a tension between our efforts to promote this holistic understanding of assessment, as engagement with knowledge and the minds of others, and our efforts to break assessment down into smaller and smaller units, intending to make this helpful for students. As a student, how do I navigate within the assessment space the journey between the micro-detail of some rubrics and the big-picture ideas of engaging with the minds of others? I offer this as a friendly provocation, and because I see this tension emerging in other higher education spaces. This is why this reflective round-up is so particularly helpful. Bringing the different blogs into conversation with one another is a great step towards starting to think – how do we do all this good practice? Should we do it all? My abiding sense, however, is that the student-centredness of all the approaches is their most powerful feature. But before students can have genuine and authentic voice, they need to understand assessment. Many of us have spent decades researching assessment and still probably have more questions than answers. Our students have largely emerged from a world of traditional exams, and all the attendant damage they do to learning and understanding assessment practices. So the next challenge, I think, is how we enable that student co-creation to fulfill its potential to inform, and to reform, assessment.
Jan McArthur
