by NICHOLAS CHARLTON and RICHARD NEWSHAM-WEST

The constructive alignment of assessments to learning outcomes is a characteristic of quality. Scholars in higher education understand that this ensures programme learning outcomes, the curriculum and learning activities align and enable students to achieve success in their assessment tasks.

However, assessment tasks don’t necessarily support the development of higher level graduate attributes or employment outcomes, frequently resulting in the graduate attributes lacking context for both students and academics. Often, competencies and competence-informed learning outcomes are seen to be context specific and needed in preparation for specific jobs or job readiness. However, the continued focus of assessing course (or subject) learning outcomes (CLOs), instead of PLOs, means that the graduate attributes are less visible and graduates do not recognise the value of career readiness skills.

PLOs have the potential to provide a more contextualised coherence to graduate attribute development, explicitly linking the learners’ needs, pedagogy, assessment and technology to career-ready skills and competencies. Academics are encouraged to develop programmes of learning and assessment that prepare students for a job, with scaffolded learning aligned across the individual CLOs (knowledge, skills and their application). There is a paucity of research that demonstrates, at a programme level, that planning of learning and assessment aligned to career or graduate attributes exists. However, the Higher Education Standards Framework 2021 mandate, recent guides and case studies suggest a refocus on programme-level assessment is occurring.

The phrase ‘program-level assessment planning’ describes the holistic approach that considers the vertical and horizontal arrangement of assessments throughout the degree to support the sequential development of discipline knowledge and career ready skills. The concept of programme-level assessment planning is based on programmatic assessment and program-focused assessment. This approach aims to address the siloed-subject, modular approach that can hinder students learning from and through assessment and enables the application of feedforward principles.

The practical approach to programme-level assessment planning is to undertake a backward mapping design approach, which focuses on the desired results (PLOs) to clarify priorities. This backward design approach requires assessments to be planned throughout the programme – from the final capstone course to the first year courses – to provide a holistic assessment journey for students that assures their cumulative knowledge and employability skills’ acquisition at the end of a programme. As backward mapping aligns assessments with the PLOs, clarity and coherence of learning purpose and graduate attributes are assured for students.

While the Higher Education Standards Framework 2021 requires coherence in course design and assessment for assurance of programme learning (for example, under Standards 1.4 and 3.1 particularly), there is a need for the regulator and university policies to enact more practical guidelines for successful implementation of programme-level assessment planning, to support student learning, the attainment of employability skills and post-graduate employment.

Nicholas Charlton, School of Education and Professional Studies, Griffith University [email protected]

Richard Newsham-West, School of Allied Health, La Trobe University r.newsham [email protected]