Integrative assessment: reframing assessment practice for current and future learning

The requirement to provide timely formative tasks that are designed to facilitate student learning and autonomy has provoked a wider examination of the role of assessment in higher education and encouraged further investigation of the alignment of learning, teaching and assessment in curriculum design frameworks. Many current authors have proposed that the primary purpose of assessment is to enhance current and future learning and that current practice tends to overemphasise the importance of assessment for progression and certification purposes. This paper proposes that a clearer distinction be made between assessment tasks designed to facilitate and test current learning through the use of formative and summative assessments, and those tasks primarily designed to enhance future learning, which could be better termed integrative assessments. This distinction would allow students and teachers to have greater clarity around the proposed outcomes and reward mechanisms associated with assessment tasks and feedback. This paper proposes that teachers should strive to incorporate four different types of assessment tasks throughout a programme of study, namely diagnostic, formative, integrative and summative tasks, and that the outcomes and reward mechanisms for different assessment types be explained more clearly to students.     

The politics and context of calls for cross‐sectoral collaborative research

This paper focuses on the contemporary trend towards cross‐sectoral education research as a policy issue. It looks at the basis of the claims for collaborative research and questions the genesis of the press for these moves, the efficacy of some of the claims, and the largely unexamined source of what is becoming a fashionable tendency. The attempt is to try and get ‘inside’ the concept in the sense of understanding what it is that is driving calls for collaborative research as a broad policy issue, rather than ‘standing off and describing it.