The Assessment and Feedback Principles and Priorities were approved for implementation in August 2022, and since then Schools at The University of Edinburgh have been challenged to update their assessment strategies in multiple ways. In this post, Dr Emily Taylor describes how colleagues are supporting this activity in the largest college in the university: Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CAHSS). Emily is a Senior Lecturer in Clinical Psychology, and Director of Learning and Teaching for the School of Health in Social Science. This blog post is part of the March-June Learning & Teaching Enhancement theme: Assessment and feedback revisited↗️.
Context
Some of the challenges that the Principles and Priorities aim to address are common to our peer universities, especially that of high assessment load. Over-assessment is a product of modularisation of teaching (Tomas & Jessop, 2019), but also the wider educational landscape. In Scotland, secondary education has become progressively more assessment-oriented with the implementation of Curriculum for Excellence found to be creating a culture of performativity (Shapira et al., 2023). Thus, students arrive at university over-oriented to assessment requirements and consequently under-oriented to learning opportunities. In an increasingly challenging economic climate, our students are under tremendous pressure to demonstrate their competencies early on and consistently throughout their degree to give themselves a competitive advantage when applying for graduate posts. This amplifies the importance of assessment over other learning activities, and translates into behaviours such as prioritising completing a summative assessment over attending teaching activities.
Staff may have responded to this prioritisation by turning learning activities into assessment activities. This might include rewarding attendance and participation, giving summative marks for previously formative assessment tasks, and moving towards a continuous assessment model without necessarily removing a final assessment. Without checks and balances, this risks a high-volume, low-value assessment portfolio.
Financial constraints on universities have been well-publicised. Cost-cutting is not an effective driver for positive change and innovation, but equally the resource implications of doing things well cannot be ignored. The Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) is shaping the teaching landscape in England with standards become increasingly established. Even if Scotland is not part of the TEF, it will still be held to its standards by incoming students and in national and international rankings. As the relative costs of research and teaching become more acutely felt, teaching quality is more in focus than ever.
The teaching landscape is also responding to a curious point in time. The Covid-19 lockdowns led to unplanned pivots to online learning that have forever changed the way we teach. Whilst students and staff have welcomed the return to in-person on-campus teaching, we also discovered the pleasures of working and studying from home, the opportunities for improving access to learning for some marginalised groups, especially disabled students, and fully engaged with the opportunities and challenges of synchronous online teaching. We are still navigating our way through the post-Covid era and, as new technologies come online, new opportunities and challenges present themselves.
The most obvious innovation is Generative AI. Across the sector there has been a fast evolution from viewing Generative AI as a source of academic misconduct that must be prevented through designing out, to creative exploration in limited contexts, to a realisation that our graduates will be expected to be literate in Generative AI when they enter the workplace, so teaching staff need to be so now.
The long tail of Covid-19 has also contributed to a cost-of-living crisis that impacts our students. More students than ever are balancing study with paid work. The economic conditions have secondary effects on healthcare education and social services, such that more of our students are in caring roles, might be parenting children who aren’t in full-time school, or are living with health challenges of their own which are not being treated or managed in a timely and effective way due to healthcare shortages.
Ultimately, we may need to completely revise the way we deliver higher education, and Curriculum Transformation is responding to this. More immediately, though, we have to take care that our teaching and assessment strategies don’t further disadvantage students who are juggling multiple responsibilities. This involves thoughtful timetabling of meaningful learning experiences, proportionate assessment for learning, and clear and accessible communication of learning and assessment tasks.
Covid-19 was a seismic event for everyone, but for children it was especially significant, impacting social, emotional and intellectual development. We don’t yet know the full extent of this impact, and we also should not underestimate the resilience of children in their capacity to recover from adversity. However, every generation of students coming through university for the foreseeable future will have been, in some way, impacted by the pandemic. This was in fairly obvious ways initially, such as whole year groups who had not experienced exams, but as time goes on, the impact will be more nuanced, diversified, and may even be positive! These impacts will almost certainly be unpredictable, and we must be flexible and open to what upcoming generations of students might bring.
So, how do we support our schools to implement a set of standards for assessing students in such a dynamic context?
Implementation
1. Listen to our students
We have been very fortunate in CAHSS to have an active and conscientious student representative body. NSS and PTES comments have helped to flesh out why students aren’t satisfied with their assessment and feedback experience, and conversations with our student reps via the Student-Staff Liaison Committee, QA forum, College Education Committee and dedicated meetings has fed directly into specific guidance for schools.
2. Establish standards, and honour autonomy
Across the College, we have examples of excellence, innovation, experimentation and staff-student partnership. No set of standards should undermine these so we consulted with staff to ensure that the proposed standards would complement but not stifle, set parameters but not limit, and continue to encourage not just minimum standards but striving for excellence.
3. Understand our Schools
Our Schools are diverse in subject matter, philosophies and epistemologies, and student and staff demographics. We consulted and consulted to understand what was needed, what would be welcomed, and what would be impractical. We have also built in review points on an annual basis to acknowledge the changing context as well as learn from our schools as they progress implementation.
What next?
The CAHSS minimum standards for assessment and feedback were given final approval by our College Education Committee in May 2024. We will be widely disseminating and promoting them in Schools for implementation in 2024-25. We are liaising with the Institute for Academic Development, who have helped us throughout, to ensure all staff have access to training to build on assessment literacy.
Emily Taylor
Dr Emily Taylor is a Senior Lecturer in Clinical Psychology, School of Health in Social Science, and Dean of Quality Assurance and Curriculum Validation for CAHSS. She is particularly interested in how academic communities can be fostered between staff and students in campus and online spaces.
