Higher Education Assessment Collaboration

Workshop Focus and Program

The broad goal of the HEAC assessment workshops is to assist higher education teachers, academic coordinators and institutions develop better quality and more cost effective assessment resources and practices. Objectives include:

developing participant knowledge and skills, and hence disciplinary and institutional capacity;
helping academics create assessment items/tasks for their distinctive contexts and needs;
enhancing the quality of assessment resources; and
initiating cross-institutional/-national assessment communities and collaborations.

The HEAC workshops are contextualised for the appropriate discipline and held in conjunction existing collaborative networks.

Each workshop involves the active discussion, review and development of existing materials, which participants bring along and work through in a small group setting.

Workshops are led by senior ACER assessment developers—experts with a decade or more producing assessment materials for high-stakes studies—and external experts drawn from the relevant field.

In order to facilitate effective group discussion, the workshops are designed for a maximum of 30 participants. This provides the opportunity for effective collaboration between senior ACER item developers and teaching staff in Australian higher education.

In the first instance, focus is being directed at large first-year courses where a collaborative approach benefits from similar curriculum content across universities and the potential to yield substantial cost reductions. However, consideration will also be given to second year courses where student retention or cross-disciplinary transfer and integration of threshold concepts must be assessed. Resulting materials and ideas can be used by academics in summative and formative assessment.