Integrated Assessment
What is integrated assessment?
Integrated assessment is assessment which is designed holistically across a degree programme rather than unit by unit, with a recognition of students’ stage of experience as a key design element. Through the course of a degree, integrated assessment (and feedback) design enables students to become ‘insiders’ to the ways of thinking and acting in a discipline through a sequenced and connected experience. In turn, this can create more of a coherent ‘narrative’ to assessment over the degree programme.
Integrated assessment places an emphasis on:
- the progressive nature of assessment (how assessment builds in complexity)
- the sequence of tasks within and across units (how different assessments complement each other)
- the role of feedback in helping students to learn (how students act on feedback)
- the balance of formative and summative assessment through the years of a programme of study (balancing learning and measurement; process and outcomes).
Over time, as systems permit, integrated design may consist of programme teams identifying opportunities in each level of study for bridge-building assessment and feedback. This could include making connections within a year of study (horizontal integration), or from one year to the next (vertical integration). Well-designed integrated assessment recognises the prior contexts of students’ learning and provides an assessment experience which aligns graduate attributes with intended learning outcomes.
Examples:
- A unit where a series of formative blog entries receive feedback and form the basis of a summative portfolio with a critical reflection
- Planning a consistent assessment type, such as a group presentation, from level 4 to level 5 for students to develop mastery and expertise in its features
- Mapping the skills and knowledge from one assessment to the next, e.g. a team project with randomly assigned participants followed by a pair project with a partner of choice
Why is integrated assessment important?
For students, a team approach to design leads to more manageable assessment loads: less summative assessment; less repetition; less duplication (and with lower marking loads for staff). It also means that in each year of the course students have an opportunity to bring together all they have achieved across the course – what they know and what they can show.
With an integrated assessment design approach, teachers can innovate across unit assessments, with students integrating learning and making sense of disciplinary ways of knowing, acting, and being. Better connected assessments also mean that students learn more from formative feedback and use it to improve; more connected feedback leads to action and agency from students – and improvements!
What do students think about integrated assessment?
Students enjoy feeling confident about what their assessments will involve and being able to make connections across their programme of study.
One student from a focus group illustrated some of the benefits of this approach:
‘I think presentation formats are the best example [as] in first year you're not very good at it and by 3rd year you'll get a lot better. It's the best way to sort of track your progress because you gain confidence in what you're taught. And that was definitely where I could see the feedback was actually [implemented].’
Whilst other students reflect on the effects of unintegrated assessment approaches:
‘I feel up to now it hasn’t really been a cohesive experience. It’s just been I do a course, you just do these random units and sometimes they link, sometimes they don’t. It doesn’t feel you’re on a pathway.’
‘It seems like [modules] don't communicate with the other modules, even though they are compulsory to our degree. It's like they're not talking to each other. They set things at the same time, so then you sort of prioritise one thing over the other and don’t do the other thing.’
Case studies within the University
Programme level assessment in Mechanical Engineering
Should we go ‘The Whole Hog’ with programme-level assessment?
Case Study: Research-rich interdisciplinary group work for Digital Health
Connecting skills, feedback and assessment with the Assessment and Feedback Portfolio
Where can someone find more information and support?
You can find more information about integrated assessment here, as well as other overviews of it here, or a further series from other institutions here.
References
Baartman, L. K. J., & Quinlan, K. M. (2023). Assessment and feedback in higher education reimagined: using programmatic assessment to transform higher education. Perspectives: Policy and Practice in Higher Education, 28(2), 57–67. https://doi.org/10.1080/13603108.2023.2283118
Charlton, N., Weir, K., & Newsham-West, R. (2022). Assessment planning at the program-level: a higher education policy review in Australia. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 47(8), 1475–1488. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2022.2061911
Jessop, T., El Hakim, Y., & Gibbs, G. (2013). The whole is greater than the sum of its parts: a large-scale study of students’ learning in response to different programme assessment patterns. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 39(1), 73–88. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2013.792108
Jessop, T., & Tomas, C. (2016). The implications of programme assessment patterns for student learning. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 42(6), 990–999. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2016.1217501