Assessment Futures
This website is a great starting point for transforming assessment into learning opportunities for students. You'll learn the key elements to integrate into your assessment tasks (such as modelling or student-design assessment), understand how to communicate with students and troubleshoot common assessment issues, or advocate for change in assessment culture at your institution. My favorite part are the checklists with questions about assessment at different institutional levels and the library of examples from different disciplines.
Assessment Futures is based on the proposition that assessment in higher education has been so distorted by concerns about certification and justification that the core purposes at the heart of higher education and, necessarily, assessment have been obscured. Whatever else it does, assessment must support learning. Assessment must foster the kinds of attitudes and dispositions, as well as the knowledge and skills, learners need for the variety of tasks they will be confronted with throughout their lives. This means that our conception of assessment needs to move beyond that of testing what has been taught, or measuring learning outcomes, to encompass one that builds the capacity of students to be effective assessors for themselves and for others.
Building the capacity of students to be effective assessors for themselves and others is the raison d’être of Assessment Futures. It provides ways of thinking about assessment activities within this new frame. This is not meant to imply that what we have been doing already is not useful and worthwhile, but that we need to see assessment through a new lens, and that the use of such a lens may lead us to making some alterations to what we do. Assessment Futures is not about new techniques or assessment methods, but about ensuring that what we do in assessment is always subordinated to the main goal of higher education, which is to develop educated citizens who can face the many challenges of a complex and changing society.