Beyond the final product: Assessment re-design for a GenAI-enabled world
Professor Faculty of Education, University of Hong Kong
This workshop draws upon the first stage of a competitively funded project seeking to investigate how assessment is redesigned under current circumstances of unlimited student access to GenAI. This issue represents one of the most compelling, and intractable, challenges currently facing higher education. The research focuses on three overarching themes. First, approaches which seek to enable productive student use of GenAI in developing assignment work. Second, process-based strategies which aim to trace the development of student thinking over time in compiling assessment products. Third, assessment tasks which offer AI-resilience, such as interactive oral assessment.
Conceptually, I aim to contribute to debates around three issues: authenticity, process-based approaches and assessment overload. Contemporary views of authentic assessment suggest students seek to develop assessment artefacts that bring them some personal meaning. Process-based approaches involve centering human judgment, iteration and evidence of student thinking in engaging with AI and assessment tasks over time. Addressing the assessment arms-race is proposed as part of strategies to tackle assessment overload and make space for careful process-oriented assessment designs. In sum, the workshop seeks to raise issues and discuss examples of practical research-informed assessment re-designs.
Biography
David Carless works as a Professor at the Faculty of Education, University of Hong Kong. He is one of the pioneers of feedback literacy research and is listed as a top 0.1% cited researcher in the Stanford top 2% list for social sciences. His books include Designing effective feedback processes in higher education: A learning-focused approach, by Winstone and Carless, 2019 published by Routledge. He was the winner of a University Outstanding Teaching Award in 2016. The latest details of his work are on his website: https://davidcarless.edu.hku.hk/.
