Authentic Assessment

Course description

** If selecting to attend via Teams, you can do so on the day via this link. **

Join us at this upcoming Learning and Teaching Academy event to learn from Dr Shashi Nallaya (Senior Lecturer, Uni SA), and Flinders’ staff Dr Rowaida Sleem, Dr Sky Marsen, Dr Melinda Thambi, Dr Tom Cochrane, Associate Professor Annabelle Wilson and Amy Hickman about their experiences developing and implementing authentic assessment. Professor Michelle Picard will also discuss the theory behind authentic assessment and facilitate a workshop activity for the group. Don’t miss your chance to hear insights into developing meaningful, authentic learning experiences. Read on for more information about each presentation.

Dr Shashi Nallaya, Senior Lecturer at UniSA
Dr Shashi Nallaya is a Senior Lecturer at UniSA working as an academic developer. Dr Nallaya is responsible for helping academics implement an innovative curriculum through mentoring, staff development sessions and resources and has recently been instrumental in a whole of university authentic assessment project. Dr Nallaya will talk through UniSA’s definition of authentic assessment and provide examples of writing authentic assessment statements.

Dr Rowaida Sleem, College of Nursing and Health Sciences
HLTH1004 Human Bioscience (Human Anatomy and Physiology) is a core topic for first-year Health Sciences students. While traditional assessments involve exams and quizzes, recent literature advocates for innovative approaches, like Arts-Based methods. In HLTH1004, students form specialised groups (e.g., OT, PT, nutrition, speech pathology, optometry) to create an artefact (3D model) of a health condition (e.g., Vocal polyps, Villous atrophy) focusing on anatomy and physiology. They then record a video using the model to explain the health condition and discuss treatment options for a fictional patient. Following this, students submit an individual reflective piece on the assignment and engage in an online self and peer contribution assessment (feedback fruit). Hear more from Dr Rowaida Sleem about this authentic approach to assessment.

Dr Sky Marsen, College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
This presentation by Dr Sky Marsen will overview some major aspects of authentic assessment as it relates to communication subjects. It will focus on one project within this framework - Global Virtual Team projects. Working in multidisciplinary teams with members scattered around the world is a major business practice even though training in this practice is neglected at university level. The presentation will document an instance of this project in the topic Strategic Communication and Public Relations.

Dr Melinda Thambi, College of Education, Psychology and Social Work
The focus of Melinda’s presentation is to explain how the contextual relevance of a postgraduate education topic taught in China as part of the Master of Educational Leadership and Management (MELM) programme was increased. An individual written assignment was transformed into a collaborative group presentation, in which groups were allocated specifically designed case studies through which they could apply their shared knowledge. These scenarios were created to mirror culturally relevant organisational scenarios. This provided students with the opportunity to work at the highest level of Bloom’s taxonomy: to ‘create a new product or point of view’ (Churchill, 2022, p. 263), as well as to enhance learning through peer support.

Churchill, R. (Ed.). (2022). Teaching: making a difference (5th edition.). John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated.

Dr Tom Cochrane, Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
In this presentation, Dr Tom Cochrane will discuss his assessment strategy in the class Happiness and Mental Health in which he gives students the option to try out a well-being technique and report on the results. He will discuss how, with guidance, such a method can allow for students to draw on their authentic experiences, while still satisfying scholarly goals in a way that can be objectively assessed. The ways that such an assessment method allow students to develop original insights into abstract theories will also be discussed.

Amy Hickman and Associate Professor Annabelle Wilson, College of Medicine and Public Health
Amy and Annabelle will draw on their experiences using Reflexivity as Authentic Assessment, provide the group with insights on student feedback received when using this approach and discuss tried and tested examples of using this method.

Type of course

Workshop