Can we ever look forward to marking? Designing assessment tasks from a trust-first perspective
Rachel Forsyth, Senior Educational Developer, Lund University, Sweden
David Boud (1999) said that assessment often does ‘double duty’: a way of saying that it has multiple purposes, which are often in tension. We want assessment to provide evidence of student achievement, but we also want it to be motivating for the student, to help them to learn, and to prepare them for future learning, among other purposes. These tensions are reflected when we are designing the conditions for the assessment: how much information do we provide? How do we ensure that the assessment is fair, valid, and secure? How do we situate and integrate the assessment task in the learning process? How can we avoid receiving a set of bland, unexciting submissions which might as well have been generated by a robot, even if they weren’t, and how can we help ourselves to look forward to seeing what students have produced?
In this workshop we will work through the processes of assessment design and management from the perspective of a joint endeavour between teacher(s) and students, thinking about how we can create assessment activities with an approach that prioritises trust from the outset, with the end goal of creating tasks which are fair, valid, secure, and interesting to mark. The workshop draws on our research into trust-building between teachers and students, including recent research on the impact of GenAI products on mutual trust.
Biography
Rachel Forsyth is a Senior Educational Developer at Lund University in Sweden and was previously head of the University Teaching Academy at Manchester Metropolitan University in the UK. She has a background in curriculum design, digital learning, and assessment design and management. She is the author of Confident Assessment in Higher Education (Sage, 2022) and co-author, with Sam Illingworth, of Generative AI in Higher Education: Redefining Teaching and Learning (Bloomsbury, 2026). Rachel is also a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
ahenetwork.org 