Surfacing and sharing advances in assessment: A communities-of-practice approach

Abstract

The focus of this chapter is on how to encourage the take-up of advances in assessment and feedback practices across and beyond one university, in ways that can bridge subject and organizational boundaries whilst avoiding top-down prescription and maintaining respect for scholarly autonomy. Against the wider backdrop of key issues that institutions need to grapple with in scaling-up assessment renewal constructively, the chapter discusses a communities-of-practice initiative at the University of Hong Kong. It sought to develop an approach to surfacing and sharing understandings about effective innovations in assessment that could help in the pursuit of institutional strategic goals. The approach adopted in this initiative is discussed in terms of the main assessment and feedback themes it addressed; the intended audiences for the project’s work; the various strategies deployed in surfacing innovative practices internationally as well as internally; and the means by which guiding principles and contextualised instances of developments in practice were more widely shared.