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Student voice in assessment

Listening to students is a vital part of supporting students in their academic journeys. Incorporating student voice into your teaching practice involves providing opportunities for students to be active learners, teaching them in ways that are meaningful and effective to them, and assessing their progress in ways that are fair, flexible and promotes personal and professional growth.

Remember: The difference between student voice strategies and other effective student-centred strategies (e.g. active learning, problem-based learning) is that in student voice you are acting on student opinions and perspectives in meaningful ways. There are many great ways in which this is being done at Monash, for example in Science, Djuke Veldhuis uses two strategies she has developed: “Post-it Note Negotiated Curriculum” and “Soft Shoe Shuffle Values Spectrum”.

The need for adaptive and creative assessments has increased as learning and instruction are moving towards a hybrid approach. By prioritising flexible assessment, educational institutions can give students more control and ownership over their learning and assessment processes. Here we explore some of the key benefits of flexible assessment and provide practical examples of how it can be incorporated into curriculum design.

From negotiated assessments and interactive feedback forms to peer teaching and active learning strategies, there are numerous ways to promote flexible assessment and encourage student engagement and empowerment in the learning process.

The following list shows a number of ways that can be implemented to encourage the student voice.

Flexible assessment is becoming increasingly important in education as delivery models continue to evolve and change. With a shift towards a hybrid model of learning and teaching, the need for assessments that are responsive and innovative has become more pressing. By prioritising flexible assessment, educational institutions can give students more control and ownership over their learning and assessment processes.
One of the main advantages of flexible assessment is its ability to cater to the diverse learning needs of students. Curriculum design should focus on using a variety of inclusive and accessible approaches and tools to ensure that all students are able to demonstrate what they know and can do. Some examples:
- Within the context of the prescribed learning outcomes (LOs) for the unit – provide students a choice of topic and/or mode of delivery to allow them to work where they are interested and are best able to demonstrate their mastery of the LOs.
- Consider allowing students to co-design assessment regimes. For example you can look at Teach HQ’s Designing assessment regimes and Design and manage peer assessments, which provide insights on mentoring and managing a student participatory approach in assessment.
- When designing rubrics and providing feedback to students, ask them to tell you what feedback they would specifically like on a task (instead of providing them only with the feedback you think they need to hear) - perhaps provide them with both!
- Ask students to explain how they have used feedback provided in earlier tasks to inform decisions/actions they have made in a current task (proving the use of feedback to feedforward). This is particularly useful in nested or scaffolded assessment tasks.
- When students submit a written assignment – have them mark it against the LOs, giving themselves a grade and providing a written justification of why they think the work is worth the grade given. Then you mark the work - respond to what the student has said about their own work along with your comments. This method is referred to as “dialogic feedback”.
- Encourage students to reflect on their own learning and to set goals for their own development. This can help to promote self-awareness and to empower students to take control of their own learning (Danmeri, 2018). Eg. what did you learn from this task/unit?, what learnings can you take from this to inform your future professional practice?, what does this experience tell you about yourself/attitudes/values/beliefs/behaviours? or how can you apply your learning here to future units?
- Consider different ways students can reflect; for example, written reflections, Vlog reflections, reflective journals and ePortfolios.
- Learners need to be taught how to reflect in deep and meaningful ways, and this needs to be built into your units. One way to achieve this is to consider the use of frameworks to support student thinking.
One way to incorporate cooperative learning is by using The Jigsaw Method. The method is a cooperative learning strategy in which students work in small groups to learn different aspects of a topic and then teach each other to achieve a group goal. This technique has proven to be effective in promoting student engagement, cooperation, and critical thinking. This diagram shows four different expert groups working in this way.
This allows students to tell you what they think are the important aspects of the content covered in the unit and what they have “taken away” from their learning. This positions students as co-constructors of knowledge in the unit and provides valuable feedback to you on your teaching of the unit.
Students can build the question bank in Google Forms and then you can edit/select and transfer questions to a Moodle Quiz. To encourage deeper thinking about the questions, you could consider having students comment on the quality/value of the questions other students pose.
This involves giving students the opportunity to provide feedback on the work of their peers. This can be done through the use of FeedbackFruits software and other tools that allow students to offer comments and constructive feedback on their classmates' work. These types of tools are particularly useful for part or draft assessments when feedback given is consistent with the rubric for the task.
This could be achieved with an inquiry-based learning strategy. Inquiry-based learning has been described as an approach that focuses on investigation and problem-solving. Instead of presenting information, or ‘the answer’, up-front. To begin, teaching staff start with a range of scenarios, questions and problems for students to navigate and experience.
For example, start by posing an authentic big issue/question/challenge for students to investigate. In public health/medicine/sport and exercise sciences this might be: “how can we increase the levels of physical activity of students on campus”? Alternatively, in occupational therapy “how can we better support students with disabilities at Monash?”.
Allow students time to actively investigate the problem and draw their own conclusions. Follow this by an opportunity to discuss with the whole class and reflect.
These types of questions pose real world problems for students and their proposed solutions could form the basis of enacted change at Monash, which may then help to shape and improve the student experience on campus.

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Student voice in assessment

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