Matchmaking: Improving the alignment between assessment methods and stated learning outcomes

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Elizabath Handsley

Flinders University

This project focuses on the complications posed for alignment by other elements of our teaching practice, namely skills vs content, graded passes and the positioning of outcomes at different levels on Bloom’s taxonomy. Alignment can be made meaningful to students if it is expressed through marking criteria, and yet these tend to be focussed on skills rather than the content that usually informs the development of outcomes. If we have graded passes, there should be a way of distinguishing between the different levels of achievement, but our stated outcomes don’t necessarily reflect this. Alternatively it would be possible to frame outcomes at different levels of Bloom’s taxonomy and link these to different levels of achievement. Again this is not the traditional approach to assessment or educational design more generally in Australian universities.

Therefore the project aims to develop an effective means of synthesising all these elements so that teaching and assessment practice can harness the power of all of them.