Assessment Design

Assessment may occur either as a final summative outcome or as ongoing formative assessments at the discretion of the unit coordinator and teaching staff.

The assessment format will need to be comprehensive in order to capture comprehensively the students progress throughout the unit.

Watch A/Prof Nick McGuigan (Accounting) and Prof Ros Gleadow (Biology)   talk about their unique approaches to assessment design for their units with work-integrated learning experiences.

Useful tips

• The assessment for your industry project should focus on both the process (formative) and  final product (summative). The final assessment outcome can also be informed by feedback from academic and industry mentors on the teams progression and performance.
• If the unit is framed around the WIL project as the main assessment task, avoid putting too much emphasis on the final product - this also assists in breaking up the students' workload.  Around 3-4 total individual assessments is usually ideal.
• Ensure you have smaller tasks such as project plans due early in semester so you can ensure the project teams are on track.
• The assessment for this unit will need to be comprehensive to address the students learning of the unit content, their professional development and the quality of their project outcome.
• At least one element of the assessment should be conducted in teams (e.g. team reflections) and if possible integrate a component of peer-review.
• Consider utilising drafted CVs, cover letters and interviews in the unit assessment (perhaps as part of the process of allocating teams to individual projects). Your industry partners may also be able to contribute to this part of the assessment process by identifying what they look for in an application.

Templates and resources

• For additional reading on the student perspectives of negative and positive impacting factors of assessment design around teamwork tasks please review the following research Student perceptions of teamwork within assessment tasks (Wilson et al. 2017).
• You can access here a Framework for Assessing WIL developed by the Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia (HERDSA) and the Guidelines for WIL Assessment developed by the Australian Collaborative Education Network (ACEN).
• For ideas and guidelines around debriefing your student teams, please review the following guide to Debriefing and Performance Review in assessment.
• Ready to ditch the essay? Here's a list of Equivalent Assessments relevant to the context of WIL projects.

Contacts

• Faculty Education Designers are also a key supporting resource for developing pedagogically rigorous assessment design. Talk to your Associate Dean (Education) to see if they may be able to support you.