developing authentic and inclusive assessment

Dr Jacob Paskins (project lead), Eleanor Day (staff), Poppy Souglides (student support), Hossein Abbas Asadi (student support)

The History of Art Assessment Review ChangeMakers project encouraged students to get involved with an important aspect of the department’s curriculum review. The project team wanted to learn more about student perceptions of assessment, from the different kinds of activities they currently undertake to the quantity and frequency of assessment. We also wanted to gain better understanding of the support students need when preparing different kinds of assessment during their studies. During the project, we recruited two student Assessment Change Champions (ACCs) who co-designed with departmental staff an online survey to canvas the opinion of current History of Art undergraduates. The ACCs promoted the survey widely to ensure a robust response rate across year groups. The project also included a lunchtime workshop that brought together students and staff to discuss their assessment needs and concerns in more detail. Students also had the opportunity to think about new and more diverse forms of assessment that the department could introduce in the future. The ACCs helped analyse the survey data, which will form part an Assessment Review Report. The report will identify aspects of assessment that are proving to be effective, and highlight areas that need attention or change. These priorities will be discussed at the History of Art Departmental Teaching Committee, which oversees changes to assessment design, and sets priorities for student skills training. Participants in the ChangeMakers project commented that although they may not personally benefit from future changes to assessment in the department, they appreciated the opportunity to share their own experiences and were glad to be able to help plan for more inclusive and authentic assessments for future cohorts of art historians.

ChangeMakers is a great opportunity to bring students and staff together to work on a project that can bring about real change. The question of assessment is clearly a matter of concern for many students, so this project generated a lot of interest. A project like this does take a lot of time to organise, from the design of the project, completion of the application, recruitment and training of participants, design, promotion and analysis of the survey, organisation of the workshops, and writing of the final report. Undertaking the project during teaching terms is very demanding, but after a successful and energetic student workshop, it is clear that the effort is worth it. The most positive part of the project was seeing students’ enthusiasm for discussing their experiences of assessment. If anything, the project was a little too ambitious as the different activities have generated so much material that the writing of the final report will take longer than expected. And while we have identified a number of quick fixes to assessment problems, most of the issues will take much longer to resolve as they will require careful review from departmental committees before major changes can take place.