How do university teachers make decisions about assessment?

Wednesday 18 September 2013 1-2pm. Venue: Barbara Falk room, CSHE, Lvl 1, 715 Swanston St., Carlton, Melbourne. Registration: lachlan.doughney@unimelb.edu.au.
Dr. Phillip Dawson, Lecturer in the Office of the Pro Vice-Chancellor (Learning and Teaching), Monash University
Abstract
From our students' perspective "assessment always defines the actual curriculum" (Ramsden), but what defines assessment? We suspect that the disjoint between assessment best-practice and assessment in-practice might be the result of pragmatic decisions made by everyday academics, and we are investigating this in the OLT-funded project Improving assessment: understanding educational decision-making in practice (Dawson, Bearman, Molloy, Boud, Joughin & Bennett, OLT ID12-2254). This presentation will focus on preliminary findings from our analysis of semi-structured interviews with 30 chalkface university teachers. Improving assessment is more than a problem of knowledge translation/transmission; we have identified a diverse set of influences on assessment design including time pressures, committee structures, technology and assessment beliefs.