Assessing what we have taught: The challenges faced with the assessment of oral presentation skills

You are here

Research and Development in Higher Education Vol. 28: Higher education in a changing world

July, 2005, 639 pages
Published by
Angela Brew and Christine Asmar
ISBN
0 908557 62 0
Abstract 

The changing nature of higher education in Australia has shifted our focus as teaching and learning professionals, in that the teaching of skills has become as important as the teaching of content. In response, the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) law school has taken a scholarly approach and designed an assessment framework to assure the quality of skills assessment. This paper will explore some of the challenges that we have faced in implementing this framework, particularly in relation to validity and reliability, in the context of an oral presentation assessment task for first year law students. It will reveal the inherent tensions that arise between striving towards quality assessment and the pragmatic realities of full-time staff that have traditionally focused on teaching legal content, large student cohorts and teaching teams of between ten to fourteen tutors, where many are casual staff. This paper will also discuss how it is proposed that the implementation of criterion-referenced assessment, in response to university policy, will address some of these issues.

Keywords: assessment framework, oral presentations