Are your assessments really equitable?

The purpose of assessments is to assess student performance, inform instruction, and to evaluate learning (Jimenez & Modaffari, 2021). It drives student learning, and yet assessments in higher education (HE) are plagued with several challenges. For example, academic integrity is a major issue facing all HEIs (Bretag et al., 2019), traditional assessments have not been successful in developing students’ employability skills (KPMG, 2020), and the inability of student cohorts with culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds to showcase their knowledge in a non-native language (Lee & Orgill, 2021). There has been an over reliance on certain types of evidence of learning that overshadowed other ways of assessing learning, thereby perpetuating inequalities in outcomes (Bal & Trainor, 2016 as cited in Montenegro & Jankowski, 2017).
The Australian government is committed to the ‘widening participation’ (Bradley et al., 2008) agenda to increase participation of non-traditional student cohorts to gain higher education. This needs to be complemented with opportunities for diverse student cohorts to succeed in HE (Montenegro & Jankowski, 2017). One of the stipulations of the Equitable Framework for Classroom Assessments (EFCA) is that accessible assessments should offer opportunities to elicit student learning (Lee & Orgill, 2021). And as different students have different ways of demonstrating their learning, it is essential to accommodate it in assessment metrics (Montenegro & Jankowski, 2017). Montenegro-Rueda et al. (2021) recommend a shift away from traditional exams to a more qualitative approach to assess students’ knowledge as the key for the future of education.
This presentation will showcase a new assessment approach called the Interactive Oral Assessment (IOA) (Sotiriadou et al., 2020) and how this helps to elicit student learning and address the aforementioned challenges.