Roundtable: Assessing student learning: Using interdisciplinary synergies to develop good teaching and assessment practice

Sydney Masonic Centre

Tuesday September 4, 2007

Title: Beyond mapping: Embedding graduate attributes at a Faculty level.

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Author: Noel Meyers

Faculty of Business, University of Tasmania

Generic graduate attributes embedding goes beyond traditional mapping. Embedding graduate attributes cumulatively develop expertise as learners’ progress through their course. Embedding requires the strategic sequencing of learning experiences over a students’ entire course to achieve the maximum benefit.

Progress to embed eight graduate attributes will be reported. Across each of the eight attributes, a range of 100+ skills and capabilities have been developed. At the end of their major, learners will exhibit mastery of each graduate attribute. Implementing this strategy requires teachers to progressively teach, have students practice, provide feedback on, and then assess their expertise in each attribute. This presentation describes progress towards embedding eight attributes across five major strands of study.

The benefits of this approach, include: clearly articulated maps that allows learners to chart their progress towards their progressive accumulation of graduate skills; coherent curriculum documents specifying the course goals, outcomes, and contribution of individual units to building graduate attributes; recommendations for the approaches individual teachers can adopt to guide students’ development of expertise; a pool of staff with curriculum and assessment design expertise and capabilities they can share with colleagues.

Keywords: authentic assessment, graduate attributes, embedding, engaging learners, cumulative curriculum development