Carmel Coady, Deborah King & Cristina Varsavsky
This roundtable will report and seek participants’ feedback on progress towards the project Developing a shared understanding of assessment criteria and standards for undergraduate mathematics, funded by the Office of Learning and Teaching. The project seeks to engage the higher education mathematics community in a conversation around assessment standards which builds upon the Learning and Teaching Academic Standards project outcomes for the sciences (Yates, Jones & Kelder, 2011), and their contextualisation within the mathematics discipline. It aims to influence assessment practices in mathematics departments, to move away from idiosyncratic marking and grading approaches that favour procedural mastery towards practices that measure the quality of all aspects of student work against external anchors, ensuring comparability of standards within and across mathematics departments. The project will result in a reference framework and toolkit to support tertiary educators in the development of quality assessment standards and criteria. The project approach incorporates the four essential elements that, according to Sadler (2009), are required to convey and apply achievement standards: (i) exemplars of different levels of achievement invoking the criteria relevant to the judgment made, each of them with an (ii) explanation of how the judgment was made; a (iii) conversation about the exemplars and their corresponding judgments to establish a common vocabulary; and (iv) the sharing of what has been tacit knowledge within the discipline community.