Let them speak! Enabling assessments for student success

Assessments play a very important role in student learning and act as an important motivator for learning (Boud, 2007; Murphy, 2017). Negative experiences with assessments can sometimes be detrimental for students’ aspirations and confidence to continue with their studies (Bearman et al., 2017). This is particularly so for commencing students as well as enabling and pathway students, who may enter these programs with low self-efficacy (Lisciandro et al., 2018; Krautloher, 2021). Unfortunately, many mainstream higher education assessments tend not to accommodate the unique needs of this cohort due to legacy practices and inflexible approaches. While there are many examples of enabling assessments from across the enabling and pathways programs in Australia, this presentation will showcase an alternative assessment approach to an invigilated examination for pathway students. Interactive Oral Assessment (IOA) (Sotiriadou et al., 2019) is an authentic assessment approach where students can demonstrate their knowledge verbally. It is a genuine and unscripted conversation between an assessor/s and the student/s around an authentic workplace scenario (Sotiriadou et al., 2019) and provides an alternative to written examinations. Although this assessment approach can be used as a formative or summative assessment, for the purposes of this presentation the focus is on examinations as it creates the highest amount of stress (Hasanbasic et al., 2019; Kumari & Jain, 2014) for pathway students. High anxiety and psychological distress has in turn been linked with poorer academic outcomes (Nieuwoudt, 2021). This assessment approach is proven to improve student outcomes and engagement, and boost their confidence (Sotiriadou et al., 2019) a crucial outcome as students’ progress into their chosen degree program, the ultimate goal of a pathway program.