Assessment Standards Knowledge exchange (ASKe)

Chris Rust (right) and Berry O’Donovan (left)
Assistant Directors, ASKe

www.business.brookes.ac.uk/aske.html

The Assessment Standards Knowledge exchange (ASKe) CETL is based at Wheatley and brings together staff based in OCSLD and in the Business School; it will receive £4.5 million from HEFCE over the next five years. Some of the funding will go on a new £2+ million building at Wheatley but ASKe is going to be much more than just a building. The role of ASKe will be to focus on ways of helping staff and students develop a common understanding of academic standards. It will build on and spread established good practice. At first, the Centre will focus on the Business School but starting slowly at first, and accelerating from year three onwards, ASKe will provide increasing support for development across the whole University, and outside Brookes as well.

What lies behind the bid for ASKe?

Most teaching staff would agree with experts such as Brown and Knight (1994) and Ramsden (2003) that assessment drives students’ learning. If you want students to engage with a particular element of a course or module, just tell them that it’ll be assessed and then stand back and watch them go. It can seem instrumental perhaps to take this line but linking things to assessment does capture students’ effort. However, sometimes their efforts are slightly off-target or misguided; perhaps they don’t receive the payback (in terms of marks and recognition) that they feel they deserve. There are times when they try hard but just don’t ‘get’ the assessment standards – they can’t see what you want them to do and/or the level expected. It’s as if they don’t clear the assessment hurdles or even jump the wrong ones. The result? They may lose motivation, lose marks or worse still, could even misunderstand what we want sufficiently to be found guilty of cheating.

Assessment standards - a challenging focus

Of course, assessment standards are not just problematic for students. Communicating and aligning expectations and level is challenging even within an experienced teaching team, and becomes more so the wider the standards need to ripple – external examiners, employers, government, the general public.

What about standards?

Even with the best of intentions, sharing assessment standards can be tricky. Sadler (1987) argues that verbal descriptions of standards are always somewhat vague or fuzzy. A piece of work marked and given feedback as being ‘highly evaluative’ would, we expect (and hope), contain a different level of evaluation at, say, first year undergraduate level than at master’s level, but the verbal description might well remain the same. Over the past decade, research undertaken at the Business School in conjunction with OCSLD has sought better ways of communicating standards and it is this research along with Jude Carroll’s work on academic integrity that forms the basis for the ASKe claim for excellence in assessment standards .

The three strands of ASKe

So have we got all the answers? No indeed! But we do have an idea about how to move towards the goal that is set out in our name: Assessment Standards Knowledge exchange, and have created three so-called ‘strands’:

Strand 1 focuses on practices, developed out of the original research, that have been proven to improve student understanding. In the same way, the University’s academic conduct system has gained an international reputation and again the Centre seeks to share these practices more widely.

In Strand 2, we want to involve others to develop further evidence-based practice supported by ASKe funding. We hope this is the avenue for many more colleagues to be involved.

Finally, we are experimenting with ways of cultivating a community of practice in Strand 3. How might members come to know assessment standards through tacit as well as explicit means? Through informal as well as formal engagement with members of a learning community? This last ASKe strand is, we admit, a bit of a long shot and it’s where the building comes in. Little is known about how academic communities develop and less on how (and if) they can be cultivated, although there are suggestions that a key ingredient is an environment that provides physical and virtual ‘space’ that encourages interaction and communication between members (Wenger et al, 2002).

Participating in ASKe

With so much going on there are opportunities to be involved in ASKe at all University departments and levels - as part of a team replicating good practice, as part of an ASKe research project team to develop further good practice, or as a core or peripheral member of a community of assessment practice. Watch out for news and invitations over the coming months and if you want to know more, just ASKe.