A Handbook for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Enhancing academic and Practice

320 ❘
Teaching in the disciplines
A key factor in Case study 4 is that of skills. This chapter has not emphasised the teaching
of skills as something distinct from content, but in the area of assessment, due
consideration must be given to student training in the mode of assessment. This is
particularly so in these areas where an enthusiasm for diversification on the one hand,
and the breaking down of discipline divisions on the other, can compound to produce
potentially damaging effects on the students, and indeed, on standards.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in joint degrees or in modular schemes where
students move across two or three subjects. Drama students, for example, may be highly
competent in oral and presentational skills (having received practice and training) where
other students may not be; design or media students may be particularly skilled in website
exercises, where English students, for example, have had little prior support. Thus
diversifying assessment in more traditional subject areas is a complex matter, requiring
sensitivity: setting a website design task may be an exercise underpinned by a set of
criteria that other subject areas may deem to be well short of an undergraduate standard.
Similarly, tutors will need to satisfy themselves that they have adequate skills to advise
and support the students in their assessment tasks, while simultaneously being sure that
the new mode of assessment has the integrity to support the level of content required.
Innovation is not intrinsically virtuous (Hannan and Silver, 2000: 1–13), and innovative
or diversified assessment tasks should be achieved within a scale that pays due attention
to training, support and the extent of the assessment tasks required of students, since too
much variety will give insufficient practice and too little opportunity for students to refine
their competences.
Essentially, my point here is an argument strongly in favour of a coherent assessment
strategy focused around a broad agreement of the range of skills to be assessed (see
Chapter 10). Once established, such a strategy provides a safe and well-mapped territory
in which diversification may take place.
Interrogating practice
What are the advantages and disadvantages of the predominant modes of
assessment in your discipline? If you were to design an assessment strategy
for your department, what would be the chief factors to consider?
OVERVIEW AND OUTCOMES
This chapter has acknowledged the great diversity of practice and kinds of learning
undertaken in these disciplinary fields, and attempted to stress the need to be sensitive
to context while focusing on the prime aim of engaging the students as active participants.
In these respects, it has argued for the importance of a rationale for all that we do, a