EditorialVolume Five, Issue 1, 2008
Special Edition: Assessment meeting the demands of practice
Guest Editors: We welcome you to the first edition of JUTLP for 2008. This special edition is focussed on meeting the needs of practice through an examination of changes in assessment at the institutional, faculty, course and subject level. The Special Edition was prompted by a roundtable 'Assessing student learning: Using interdisciplinary synergies to develop good teaching and assessment practice' in Sydney on Tuesday 6th September, 2007 sponsored by the Carrick Institute (now renamed the Australian Learning and Teaching Council). The forum hosted 45 people from around Australia and New Zealand to discuss strategies for improving assessment in the higher education sector. Participants, and those who expressed an interest in the Forum, were invited to develop papers and submit them for consideration in this special issue. In the first paper, Brown and Littrich report on the roundtable process and critically examine a framework for distributive leadership to improve assessment practice in higher education. Falchikov and Thomson report more broadly on drivers for innovation and the impact that demands of practice have on assessment. They examine internal and external drivers through a review of recent literature in the field. Taylor's paper examines the complexity of assessment practice for first year students in higher education by examining three phases of assessment: assessment for transition, assessment for development and assessment for achievement. She asserts the need to focus on assessment for transition to ensure retention of first year students and provides examples across a number of disciplines. The final four papers examine disciplinary perspectives on assessment practice. Thompson, Treleaven and their colleagues provide some insight to the integration of graduate attributes within assessment criteria through an online assessment mechanism that has been used in Business Education. In a Faculty of Law, O'Brien and Littrich conducted an audit of the skills curriculum and identified necessary changes required in assessment practice to meet the needs of future lawyers. Based in a Faculty of Creative Arts, Ellmers, Foley and Bennett examine assessment practice in a final year graphic design program to shift the focus from surface to deep approaches to learning through a staged assessment procedure which focuses on reflection. In the final paper Brown examines professional experience in a Bachelor of Teaching through the use of an assessment rubric which is designed to develop a shared language between pre-service teachers, field based colleague teachers and university lecturers. As editors of this special edition we would like to acknowledge the assistance of the anonymous reviewers who provided detailed and constructive criticism to the authors.
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