When: Monday 20th June 2022
Where: Darwin Conference Suite, Canterbury campus
Rethinking assessment and feedback designs for learning enhancement
As teachers, we are designers. How we design assessments and opportunities for feedback enactment are critical aspects of teaching practice. Assessment design offers a key point of leverage for enhancing education, because many students strategically focus on it. While students may skim assigned readings or skip lectures, they must complete assessments to progress. Higher education assessment also structures many hours of students’ independent effort and influences classroom preparatory activities educators design. Thus, improving assessment can have a big impact on student learning.
Likewise, feedback can be one of the most powerful ways of enhancing students’ learning if students are prepared to seek out or use all available sources of feedback to improve their subsequent work. Teachers can and do design opportunities into their curricula for students to receive, interpret, and act on feedback. Those opportunities can act as a bridge between the assessments students are completing and the teaching environment. Students harnessing the power of diverse potential feedback sources that exist within the learning environment is one area that is developing within feedback research and practice. The challenge for teachers is how we help our students to attend to a wider range of sources of feedback information.
The programme for the conference is now available here. Presentations are grouped into the categories of ‘Authentic Assessment’ and ‘Formative Feedback’. The conference will be opened by Professor Richard Reece, Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Education and Student Experience, and other highlights include a keynote speech from Dr Edd Pitt and Professor Kathleen M. Quinlan of the Centre for the Study of Higher Education (CSHE), workshop-style activity sessions, poster presentations, and the award of this year’s University Teaching Prizes and Diversity Mark Award.
To book a place at the conference, please sign up via Eventbrite by 13 June 2022.