Abstract

SMART Assessment Hub as a project serves to provide faculty development support on fine-tuning of assessment practices for graduate success in the 21st century.  This includes how assessment tasks (traditional and technology-mediated) are designed to enable knowledge formation and knowledge building, and how to develop academic and transferable skills through a variety of assessment tasks, including technology; faculty members have an opportunity to gain greater understanding of the process to communicate learning expectations through using rubrics in criteria referenced assessment, and varied types of feedback for learning engagement.  To build assessment literacy in the community, faculty staff with teaching responsibility is invited to a variety of professional development activities offered by experienced faculty staff and international experts on assessment.  Second, effective assessment practices in disciplines in the university are collected and shared to the public through the project.  As assessment design has direct influence on how students prepare and perform in different assessment tasks, SMART Assessment Hub serves to provide student support to heighten the awareness of planning for and applying a variety of assessment strategies to develop academic and professional competence beyond a course assignment.  This includes inviting students to participate in the ‘2+1’ learning community, in which students will form buddy groups to plan and report active learning strategies used for assessment.

Brief write-up

Project objectives

SMART Assessment as a project provides faculty development support on fine-tuning of existing assessment practices for graduate success in the 21st century. This includes how assessment tasks (traditional and technology-mediated) are designed to enable knowledge formation and knowledge building, and how to develop academic and transferable skills through a variety of assessment tasks. Moreover, sharing of learning strategies and good practice with students serves to provide support to students to heighten their awareness of planning for and applying a variety of assessment strategies to develop academic and professional competence beyond a course assignment.

Activities, process and outcomes

A dialogic approach with faculty was used in the project with initial consultations with them regarding various assessment issues. Assessment experiences of their students were collected and channeled back to them to serve to fine-tune the assessment design such that they can continue to enhance assessment practices. We successfully assisted teaching staff to feedforward on assessment design. Exemplars were invited to provide workshops through Centre for Learning Enhancement And Research and become assessment champions in ‘SMART assessment hub for teachers’. More stories on student ways of pursuing success were collected to be part of the learning community for students.

Deliverables and evaluation

Stories of nine teacher champions and five stories and ten tips from 29 students on student success were created, and can be viewed at www.smartassessments.net.

Dissemination, diffusion, impact and sharing of good practices

• Series of ‘SMART Assessment’ workshops were hosted through Centre for Learning Enhancement And Research communicating good assessment practice with faculty members.
• SMART assessment hub for teachers and students was created to serve as a channel to communicate exemplars of assessment practices by faculty in disciplines and learning strategies by student success.
• Shared best practice in five local and two international peer-reviewed conferences and published two journal papers.