Enhancing assessment briefs and briefing through visual assessment mapping: A Masterclass using the Making Assessment Process Seen (M.A.P.S.) approach
Associate Professor and Course Leader for the Postgraduate Certificate in Teaching (PGCert) in Creative Education at Ravensbourne University London
What happens when we create and use visual maps of assessment requirements and journeys alongside traditional text-based briefs? How might this affect academic practice and students’ experiences of communicating, decoding and navigating assessment? These are questions I have been exploring through practice and research for more than five years.
Building on presentations at the AHE Conference in 2025 and 2026, and on my recent research in this area, this hands-on masterclass introduces the evolved M.A.P.S. framework: Making Assessment Process Seen. The approach complements, rather than replaces, the traditional assessment brief. It asks educators to interrogate the assessment process from a student perspective and to make its meaning, sequence, thresholds and sources of support more visible.
The M.A.P.S. framework guides educators to create these visual assessment maps across four developmental stages:
- Make Meaning: distilling the ‘assessment essence’
- Align Assessment: visually structuring the learning trajectory, ‘joining the dots’
- Pinpoint Pinch-points: surfacing learning thresholds and challenges
- Seen Scaffolding: providing context-specific support at the point of need
This masterclass is designed as a collaborative design studio. After providing a brief overview of the approach, sharing authentic visual map examples across diverse disciplines and presenting preliminary research data on its impact, I will invite participants to actively engage in the thinking and design process. Working with a real or imagined assessment brief, participants will move through the four stages of creating an assessment map, while critically discussing practical design considerations and ways in which AI could potentially support this process.
The session concludes with an open dialogue on student-partnership review of the designed assessment map, integrating visual maps dynamically into institutional VLEs and returning to them during teaching as ongoing orientation tools to make learning and assessment journeys more transparent.
Join this masterclass if you have an interest in assessment briefs and assessment briefing, whether you want to revitalise your own practice or support others to do so.
Biography
Virna Rossi is an Associate Professor and Course Leader for the Postgraduate Certificate in Teaching (PGCert) in Creative Education at Ravensbourne University London. A National Teaching Fellow (NTF), Principal Fellow of Advance HE (PFHEA), and SEDA Fellow on the SEDA Roll of Honour, she has over two decades of experience in educational development, curriculum and assessment design and SoTL.
Virna is the author of Inclusive Learning Design in Higher Education (Routledge, 2023) and Designing Impactful PGCert Courses (Routledge, 2026). An active external examiner and peer reviewer, she regularly delivers keynotes and workshops across the UK and internationally on inclusive learning, assessment design and academic practice. Her current research focuses on the impact of the PGCert provision and on Visual Assessment Mapping as an approach to communicating and decoding assessment journeys.
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