Planning assessments

Plan your assessments when you plan the unit for three reasons:

1. Good preparation will make your job much easier. As assessor, you might need to manage people, programs, schedules, and administration responsibilities.
2. You should tell students how they will be assessed when you start teaching.
3. It will give you a very clear idea of what you are aiming for so you can focus your teaching.

You might need to adjust the assessments as an on-course redirection if you are new to teaching or teaching a new unit that you have never taught and assessed before. Unfortunately, even the best-planned units sometimes hit the brick wall of reality. But that's better than making it up as you go along.

Consider language, literacy and numeracy skills are required for the assessment

in higher education, you should be able to expect a relatively high standard of language and literacy skills for reading materials and writing essays and reports. However, these vary greatly between first year undergraduates and graduate students.

Consider cost-effectiveness

Examine the cost-effectiveness of your assessment:

• How much lost productivity for the student (and perhaps the supervisor) will there be in the workplace?
• How much time will it take for the assessor to prepare and conduct the assessment?
• What materials will be required for assessment?
• Is the assessment a one-off or can the procedure be used again and again?

This is not so much a factor in many human services programs, but becomes huge when materials and equipment are expensive or when plants must be temporarily closed down.

Make allowable adjustments

Fairness involves making allowable adjustments so that the student is not disadvantaged. Allowable means that they may not compromise program requirements. Most adjustments incur little or no financial outlay, but do take time, effort and thoughtfulness on your part.

Whatever the case, you need to make sure that your assessment will work for your students. It is your responsibility to make any adjustments and confirm them with co-workers and supervisors.

You may have to adjust the assessment for:

1. physical disability involving hearing, vision, voice, mobility
2. intellectual disability
3. a medical condition such as arthritis, epilepsy, diabetes, asthma that is not obvious but may impact on assessment
4. differences in learning progress
5. reading or writing disability
6. denominational or other religious differences
7. cultural background or perceptions
8. age
9. gender.

As a reasonable adjustment, you might need to do one of the following:

1. take into account the student's language, literacy, numeracy requirements
2. give personal support (for example: reader, interpreter, scribe)
3. use special equipment
4. flexible assessment sessions to allow for fatigue or administering of medication
5. change the format of the assessment materials (for example, write them in Braille or the student's first language, use audiotape/videotape)
6. adjust the physical environment
7. revise your proposed assessment methods or tools
8. consider age and gender
9. consider cultural beliefs, traditional practices and religious observances
10. arrange for a member of the community to accompany the student.

Some assessment strategies are not particularly flexible. If the skill is to write a report, then the appropriate assessment strategy is a written report. However, the allowable adjustment might be that the report relates to a topic in which they have some expertise. Some packages specify what is not allowable as an adjustment.

Specific adjustments: Context

The most common kind of allowable adjustment comes from context. For example, an urban youth worker in a church might have different assessment needs to a government youth worker in a country town, though both could be assessed using the same youth worker standards and both might be equally competent.

Other examples are:

• fitting into family schedules
• assessment materials on videotape
• change of venue
• design of shorter assessment sessions to allow for fatigue or medication
• selecting assessment activities that fit their needs or backgrounds
• use of equipment such as a word processor or lifting gear
• allowing special techniques for lefthanders
• using alternative ways of gathering evidence (simulations, role plays, oral assessments)

Specific adjustments: Culture and language

You can make allowable adjustments for culture and language:

• allow work to be done in languages other than English if you have an interpreter or speak that language, and if English is not part of the requirement
• allow other teaching-learning styles
• identify different cultural expectations in learning.

Specific adjustments: Disability

Assessors need to find out whether they need to adapt the assessment to the student's disability. For example:

• A blind person taking a written examination might need a reader, or Braille documents and a Braille writer, a large print version of the paper, or audiotape. He may need either a scribe or a word processor.
• A deaf person may need an Auslan interpreter.
• A dyslexic student may take an interview rather than a written test.
• A sick person may need an attendant carer.
• Students may use a scribe or a word processor if their disability makes them unable to write.

Reasonable adjustments for disabilities have limits. They may not cause you unjustifiable hardship. This is defined in terms of the benefit or detriment is likely for the student, the effect of the disability, and the financial cost to you. This means:

• You don't have to give an adjustment if it won't make any real difference. This applies to cases where an adjustment provides little benefit for the student, or where lack of an adjustment provides little detriment for the student.
• You must give an adjustment that provides significant benefit for the student, as long as it does not incur unfair expense to you. If the adjustment imposes unfair financial cost, then it is not required (For example, a small organization cannot be expected to hire an extra personal tutor, provide specialized extra equipment, or produce a special edition of texts.)
• If the disability is so serious that the student cannot perform the program requirements within allowable adjustments, you don't need to make unrealistic allowances. You must give the result not yet competent. For example, if a blind person shows up for visual arts, you don't have to pass them.

Integrating assessment into classroom schedules

Some kinds of integrations are very simple.:

• Give more time for practice
• Use the same activity for both practice and assessment
• Integrate assessment into regular class activities to minimize stressfullness.
• Give students practice assessments before the actual assessment to minimize stress. These may be informal assessments, peer assessments or self-assessments.

Classroom schedules normally give you limited time to get students to the outcome. Consider the possible advantages of integrating assessment into classes:

1. Assessment is easier to manage if you can use the same activity for practice, formative assessment and final assessment.
2. If you let each stage of a lesson flow naturally into the next, practice progresses easily into the final assessment. Students are better prepared for assessment and less nervous.
3. It is less likely that students will fail the unit because you have observed their practice and given formative assessments.
4. You can normally get everything done within your time limits. Students have a better chance of being ready for the final assessment on time if you notice soon enough what they still need help or extra practice with.

Here's how sessions can follow these stages:

You can also use the same progression over several lessons or over a whole unit. It is normally a mistake to do a summative assessment in each lesson, and you would only have summative assessment towards the end of the unit.

Avoid holding many small assessments over a longer period, becuase you might not put all the partss together. Make sure that it really is summative assessment and that you put all the parts together.

RPL assessment in the professions

Higher qualifications are driven by knowledge and concepts. Skills usually take a longer time to develop because they take considerable reflection.

RPL assessments in the professions are more difficult for these reasons:

1. Students usually work under minimal supervision and the immediate superior is often at a different location. Getting the supervisor to take a role in assessment is not very helpful.
2. The assessment timeframe is difficult. People at this level of responsibility are decision-makers. But it's a long time between making a major decision and getting results that can be used to evaluate the decision.
3. Assessment requires more expertise. Assessors must be competent subject matter experts, with both theoretical and practical knowledge.
4. The students' work is conceptual. But knowing a static chunk of knowledge is not as helpful as being able to find and evaluate knowledge and to generate new knowledge.
5. Students work in various scenarios with changing variables. Just knowing how to do something isn't enough; they need to know how to do it differently in different situations. If you ask them how to do something, they'll begin with: It depends on Sometimes they must plan for situations that can only be envisaged or forecasted.