The Future of Transversal Competencies in Higher Education Assessment

This chapter evaluates the rising significance of transversal competencies and the implications for higher education assessment practices. Transversal competencies are expected to play a definitive role in future of work scenarios. This chapter evaluates the decisions and impacts surrounding the integration of transversal competencies into higher education assessments. In particular, the chapter explores the commitments and adjustments that higher education leaders must make to build the competence assessment infrastructure and supports required. The guiding role ‘student-centred learning' pedagogies can play is discussed. Relatedly, early-stage competence frameworks are offered as insight into how student-centred learning can deliver novel, active, reflective assessments that embrace competence diversity and target meaningful development. Finally, a roadmap is offered for higher education leaders to guide them in this challenging but pertinent transformation of university teaching and learning.

An Integrated Approach to Assessment as a Co-ordinating Framework

This is an invited chapter in review. It will appear as a chapter in the forthcoming . Research Handbook on Innovations in Assessment and Feedback in Higher Education from Elgar Publishing and edited by Carol Evans and Mike Waring. All assessments are events within a process that has the goal of making decisions about instruction, learning, curriculum, students, institutions, and consequences. Three underlying disciplines (i.e., psychometrics, psychology, and sociology) inform the evaluation of assessments. Error is ubiquitous in the selection of tasks that constitute an assessment, the administration, marking, reporting, and decisions contain a non-ignorable component of error that has to be mitigated. Psychological ego factors in the marker and the assessee can be maladaptive in generating responses to assessment demands; awareness of this validity threat is needed to support participants into adaptive effort. Environments, from cultural norms to government policies, create contexts that can contribute greater error and psychological ego into the system, especially when high-stakes accountability pressures, as opposed to low-consequence formative support, are implemented. I conclude with suggestions of how integration of these underlying disciplines can improve the credibility and quality of higher education assessment.

Study of the Expectations of Employers-Partners of Educational Institutions as a Necessary Element of Strategic Development and Creation of the University Image

The problems of image are now becoming a strategic management concern for higher educational institutions since they affect the level of satisfaction and loyalty of all parties interacting with the institutions. Efficient image management can be critical to the survival and success of an organization in the context of government funding reduction and a highly competitive environment. The article analyzes the results of a survey on the Anketolog.ru platform which involved 52 respondents and was aimed at collecting the expert commentaries of potential employers engaged as tutors in the educational process at Baikal State University (BSU). The survey revealed assessments of the quality of training provided by the system of higher education, assessment of the current BSU’s graduates employment efficiency, as well as the level of BSU’s graduates’ satisfaction with the quality of their training and skill level. The «word cloud» method enabled the authors to determine what skills (competencies) obtained by the graduates the potential employers consider the most important, and to find the right wording for them and for the relevant courses to be included in the academic programs. Therefore, the analysis of the survey results provided the data on the demand for specialists trained at the university and the requirements for their skills and characteristics expected by potential employers, which helps to determine possible strategic prospects for BSU’s cooperation with potential employers in the 5-year period to come. Though the results of the study are of a practical value for Baikal State University, they might be useful for any university to build up its image.

Assessment and verification: A higher education perspective

The term Assessment and Verification is an integral part of the student achievement and considered as a fundamental function of higher education. Assessment and verification confirm and assures the academic integrity and standard which has a vital impact on student behaviour, colleagues’ involvements, the university reputation and finally the student’s future lives. The research aimed to explore various academic and industry-based literatures to analyse the importance of assessment and verification and to identify areas to ensure reliability in assessment by testing skills and knowledge. The research used experimental research methods (primarily reflection) using literary forms to analyse the theory with the reinforcement of the practice from the university experiences. It also has collected data using semi-structured interview from mutually agreed department colleagues from five different higher educational institutes consists of three universities and two alternative providers based in London, United Kingdom. The result showed that assessment in higher educational institutes have not kept pace with the changes and no longer justify the outcomes we expect from a university education in relation to wide-ranging knowledge, skills, and employability. The research findings enable the educators to help create and implement an inclusive teaching and learning environment to improve the learner’s expectation and academic performance.

Value-added in Higher Education: a new methodology for undergraduate programs in Brazil

Among the quality indicators released by the Brazilian Higher Education Assessment System (Sinaes), the Indicator “Difference between Observed and Expected Performance” (IDD) has the purpose of measuring the contribution of the course to student achievement during undergraduate programs. The research presented here offers a new methodology for calculating the IDD (Model IDD-VDCF), examining the philosophical and statistical underpinnings of quality measures, focusing on those that capture the value-added as a student achievement growth. The survey included a sample of 30,668 students, from 911 accounting undergraduate programs in Brazil. The insertion of control variables (at the student and at the institution level) reduced the bias of the IDD estimate associated with the student's selection in specific Accounting Sciences courses. The results call attention to the need to consider the students' learning context when one wants to compare the performance between institutions based on standardized tests. The major contribution of this work is the development of a measure that disentangles more fully what the contribution of program is to student learning, and what merely is a reflection of the capacity that a student brought to the program.

Undergraduate Students as Partners in a Writing Course: A Case Study

Engaging undergraduate students and faculty as partners in learning and teaching is arguably one of the most important and flourishing trends higher education in the 21st century, particularly in the UK, North America, Australia, and New Zealand. Students as partners is a concept that intersects with other major teaching and learning topics, such as student engagement, equity, decolonization of higher education, assessment, and career preparation. In this context, the aim of this presentation is to report on a case study, where four undergraduate students (hired as undergraduate research students) and a faculty/program coordinator collaborated in the fall of 2020 to review and re-design the curriculum of English A02 (Critical Writing about Literature), a foundational course in the English program at the University of Toronto Scarborough. This presentation will serve as a platform for these students and faculty to share the logistics of this partnership, its successes, challenges, future prospects, and possible recommendations for faculty and students who may partake similar projects in the future. Keywords: Students as Partners (SaP), writing, curriculum, decolonization

Student ‘voice’ and higher education assessment: Is it all about the money?

University administered Student Evaluation of Teaching surveys, while used primarily by educators and their managers to review and improve the quality of courses and teaching, can also be used by universities’ marketing campaigns and websites as a means of stressing their institution’s student friendliness and responsiveness to students’ needs. Changes in assessment practices is one way that tertiary institutions are responding to students’ preferences. However, there is a lack of understanding of the underlying factors that moderate decisions about assessment changes. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether or not a meaningful body of research concerning student ‘choice’ in higher education assessment exists, and how the extent of student ‘choice’ may change in the future. Emphasis has been placed on the assessment methods adopted in law and professional degrees in Australia. However, a broad review of international research from other relevant higher education discipline areas has also been undertaken in this paper.

Challenges in reforming higher education assessment: a perspective from afar

¿Podemos estar seguros de que la evaluación en la educación superior satisface la necesidad de desarrollar y garantizar resultados de aprendizaje de alta calidad? La evaluación actual es típicamente una colección de prácticas convencionales que nunca han sido seriamente cuestionadas. Hace diez años, como parte de un proyecto nacional, representantes de universidades australianas se reunieron para identificar una agenda para el cambio en la evaluación. El documento resultante Evaluación 2020: siete propuestas para la reforma de la evaluación en la educación superior, se centró en cómo debía cambiar la evaluación para apoyar el aprendizaje a lo largo de la vida. Es decir, no se trata de cómo los estudiantes pueden aprobar el próximo examen, sino de que aprendan lo que será útil más allá del momento de la graduación. Desde una perspectiva centrada en el aprendizaje, este documento analiza a nivel internacional el progreso que se ha producido en las universidades en torno a la reforma de la evaluación desde la perspectiva de uno de sus actores. Se inicia considerando el documento Evaluación 2020 para ver dónde aún se necesitan acciones. Se revisa algunos de los principales cambios en la evaluación en la educación superior y sus implicaciones. Estos incluyen el tránsito de comparar estudiantes (evaluación referida a normas) a juzgar resultados contra estándares (evaluación basada en estándares) y, lo que es más importante, el cambio conceptual de pasar de un propósito simple de la evaluación, como es el de certificar a los estudiantes, a considerar múltiples propósitos, incluyendo ayudar al aprendizaje y al desarrollo de la capacidad de los estudiantes para emitir sus propios juicios.