Leading assessment change: What does it take to shift the dial?
Professor Lydia Arnold, Associate Pro Vice-Chancellor (Learning, Teaching and Digital), Harper Adams University, England
This keynote shares lived experience of enacting and leading change in assessment and feedback in higher education. It is a messy tour of practice, exploring themes of success, failure, emotion, culture, and working in a contested space with many legitimate concerns and competing priorities.
Drawing on experiences of classroom practice, curriculum change, academic development, technical systems work, and managing processes, it shares approaches to leading assessment and feedback that worked and those that really didn’t. It shows how change at any scale can involve personal vulnerability, uncertainty, and a great deal of imperfection, and why an understanding of the whole university system is genuinely needed to create manageable, sustainable assessment.
The keynote considers assessment practice as a matter of both heart and head. The values we hold can provide a compass for navigating change, but they can also become blind spots.
Sharing insights from three decades of practice, leadership and scholarship, the talk reflects on what has changed in assessment and feedback, and what remains stubbornly difficult. It draws on first-hand experience alongside conversations with other change leaders, considering the contribution of scholarship and research to improving assessment and feedback, and the continuing importance of connecting theory and practice. This is a talk about the realities of the assessment front-line offering some pointers and lessons learned that may be of value to colleagues in considering their impact on policy and practice.
Biography
Professor Lydia Arnold is Associate Pro Vice-Chancellor (Learning, Teaching and Digital) at Harper Adams University, England. An academic developer at heart, she works at the intersection of practical leadership challenges in learning and teaching. She leads institutional developments in curriculum enhancement, artificial intelligence in education, digital learning, academic professional development, and the scholarship of learning and teaching.
An active educator, she teaches on academic development programmes and research methods courses. Her scholarly interests include assessment design, learning technologies, and action research as a form of professional learning and development.
Lydia is an active contributor to professional networks and speaks regularly at learning and teaching conferences and events. She has also maintained a professional blog since 2006, documenting and reflecting on her evolving practice in higher education.
