High quality student assessment to be advanced under new grant
New Monash-Warwick Alliance funding will underpin research led by our Medical Education Research and Quality (MERQ) team, who will advance practice around the use of assessment in public health education.
Assessment has long been used as a measure of teaching and learning success, but has a chequered past. It’s been argued that traditional assessment tools such as formal exams provide only discrete snapshots of performance, tend to be uniform and hard to adapt to the specific knowledge skills and student backgrounds, and are often antiquated and inauthentic. As many former students can attest, the pressure of exams can mean scores don’t always reflect true knowledge gain, or the student’s ability to integrate and apply it effectively.
For educators to move from traditional assessment practices towards diverse, dynamic and feedback-oriented assessments aligned with learning outcomes, they need to understand the underlying rationale for assessment change, and be open to modifying approaches.
Both Monash University and Warwick University will supply Principal Investigators; A/Professor Danijela Gasevic from our School leads the Australian team, while Warwick University’s A/Professor Elena Riva contributes from the UK.
A/Professor Gasevic says, ‘It’s fantastic to be supported by the Monash-Warwick Alliance to do this research, which will ultimately benefit public health educators and students across both institutions. Both Universities deliver cutting-edge public health research, this type of research is equally important to invest in, as it allows us to more effectively pass that knowledge on, and build a highly employable network of graduates into the future.’
Shifting the paradigm around assessment among the education community has been a long, slow process. But the need for online assessment throughout the pandemic has created a disruptive opportunity to rethink assessment design in higher education. Some of the solutions created by educators over the last two years provide more authentic assessment practices, building employability skills of future graduates.
As universities return to face-to-face teaching, it’s important to learn whether the educators will continue to adopt and apply alternative exam assessments or revert them to traditional counterparts.
The researchers will begin with a scoping review of current evidence related to assessment literacy and practice among public health educators, and the influence of the pandemic on those.
They’ll examine the lived experiences of both educators and students through analysis of recordings of in-depth group sessions held using a ‘friendship’ framework. This methodology minimizes the presence of the researcher, in an attempt to reduce the power imbalance that often affects qualitative data collection.
The assessment literacy of public health educators will be measured via a standardized tool.
Once the results of these three activities are finalized, the investigators will develop and lead a masterclass to both Monash University and Warwick University public health educators, to share findings and improve practice based on them. Post-delivery focus groups with masterclass participants will then be used to identify barriers to change.
The researchers expect to conclude the project in late 2023.
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About Monash University
Monash University is Australia’s largest university with more than 80,000 students. In the 60 years since its foundation, it has developed a reputation for world-leading high-impact research, quality teaching, and inspiring innovation.
With four campuses in Australia and a presence in Malaysia, China, India, Indonesia and Italy, it is one of the most internationalised Australian universities.
As a leading international medical research university with the largest medical faculty in Australia and integration with leading Australian teaching hospitals, we consistently rank in the top 50 universities worldwide for clinical, pre-clinical and health sciences.
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