Project Outline

The Assessing and Assuring Graduate Learning Outcomes (AAGLO) project will support productive institutional participation in the Federal government's plans to transform higher education in Australia through the redesign of quality assurance arrangements. The project's focus is highly relevant given the establishment of both the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA) and the Standards Panels in Australia in 2011.

The focus on Learning Standards that has emerged from the Bradley Review is attributed to community concerns with the consistency of standards across the higher education sector and with the adequacy of quality assurance arrangements that did not sufficiently consider teaching and learning outcomes. 'Assurance of Learning Standards' (TEQSA) will emphasise the importance of assessment in relation to agreed external reference points. It highlights the fact that assurance of the standards of graduate learning outcomes rests largely on the ability of assessment practices to deliver convincing evidence of achievement of those outcomes to relevant stakeholders.

Previous work has clearly demonstrated the importance of identifying appropriate learning outcome standards and much recent work undertaken in Australia and internationally has focused on developing lists of discipline-specific outcome standards. Many such lists are now available as external reference points for developing statements of outcomes, however, regardless of the 'outcomes' included on the list, the generation of evidence of the standard of their achievement is dependent on having processes in place for the assessment of students (or graduates) abilities.

The last twenty years of research in the field of graduate outcomes has consistently emphasised the importance of the disciplinary or contextual expression of these abilities. This places a clear focus on the role of discipline-based assessment to provide convincing evidence of their achievement. The variability in assessment practices among disciplines is widely recognised with different disciplines often having different 'signature' assessments. There is also typically variability between assessment practices in the same discipline at different universities. Given the intention to support diversity in institutional offerings this is to be expected. There is also considerable variability in the processes used by different Australian higher education institutions to assure the standards applied in those assessments. The presumed variability in standards between institutions that arises from the current situation is a regular topic for public concern and comment.

The sorts of assessment tasks and assurance processes which generate convincing evidence of the standard of achieved outcomes to different stakeholders (eg accreditation bodies, employers, students, academic communities, governments etc) in various disciplines is a question to be explored further in this project. However the existing literature on assessment points to the importance of authentic, integrated assessment tasks involving multiple assessors drawn from different stakeholder groups.