Assessing the assessments : what have we learned?

The "Assessing the Assessments" project, funded by the Australian Government's Office for Learning and Teaching (OLT ID14-3562) has used an iterative process to develop an evaluation framework to assist academic staff at tertiary institutions to determine the alignment of their assessment items with the Chemistry Threshold Learning Outcomes (CTLOs) (Schmid et al., 2016). In conjunction with professional development workshops in which attendees explored the alignment of assessment items with the CTLOs, a user-friendly tool has been developed which can be used to evaluate assessment items. The tool yields ratings for both Task Design and Assessment Criteria for each CTLO within the assessment task evaluated, highlighting areas of potential improvement in current assessment practices. Comparison of self-evaluations of tasks submitted to the project with evaluations conducted by the project team shows that in the majority of cases, academics (including project team members) over-estimate the ability of their assessment items to confirm achievement of CTLOs, as the new regulatory environment requires. Recommendations to increase the coverage of CTLOs through changes to assessment procedures will be presented.