As your first step, it’s important to think about the alignment of your course as a whole, considering how your Learning Objectives, teaching and learning activities, and assessments all map against and feed into one another. Approaching assessment design in this way, going right back to the fundamental design of your course and/or module, ensures that there is a solid rationale underpinning your assessment, allowing you and your students to have a clear understanding of the skills/knowledge being tested, which Learning Objective(s) they are demonstrating, and how teaching and learning activities prepare students for the assessment. Below are some steps to support you with alignment in your assessment.

• Create clear, measurable learning objectives in accordance with these core skills and knowledge. Use action-based verbs to ensure your LOs are clearly defined, easy to understand and actionable.
• Identify the essential skills and knowledge that need to be demonstrated to show level-appropriate knowledge and competency for the subject. NB: Don’t forget to include any wider graduate outcomes or accredited bodies skills/knowledge that need to be shown.
• Centre your assessment around these skills and knowledge, mapping Learning objectives to assessment outputs and designing a format that sets up students to effectively demonstrate their capabilities and understanding. Ensure that the rubric clearly reflects not only the marking criteria is level appropriate (see QAA and Subject Benchmarks) but that the criterion involved in your rubric is mapped against the required skills knowledge and linked back to the learning objectives.

When looking at the curriculum it is important to look at the variety of skills and knowledge that will be taught throughout the sessions and thinking about the wider context of learning to ensure constructive alignment between objectives, learning & teaching alongside assessment. Skills taught need to translate across the module, programme and into wider areas beyond the classroom. This includes a range of subject specific and non-subject specific skills. So it’s important to not only look at your own outcomes but think about the range of assessments, skills and knowledge that are being taught across the wider programme to ensure parity of knowledge and a variety of assessment types and opportunities.

At the University of Lincoln we also want to ensure that students are empowered for employment so we want to focus on four key skill areas. Global mindset, creativity, self-awareness and wellbeing alongside social responsibility. More detail about the 16 different skillsets all of our courses should promote can be found here: Lincoln for Life wheel (web).

Following on from constructive alignment, or rather as part of it, it’s important to think about the context of a degree and any industry-related skills students need to learn along the way. Building these in from the start of their degree helps to effectively prepare students for professional environments beyond university and allows them to see the value and rationale in the work they’re completing. Such context is essential when designing authentic assessment. The context provided can be around real-life events, role-based approaches, professional contexts, scenario driven or even based off research, understanding and application through different tasks. We have provided some questions to help guide you with creating the context.

• How will this context be provided to the student? Can you present it in a way that reflects industry practice?
• How will you embed the within the course? Will you introduce it on a weekly basis? Will you build up to it in the latter part of a module?
• How will you communicate the marking criteria to the student? Is there industry or professional language you can use that will support authenticity?
• Does it leave opportunities for choice? Can students choose an approach or theory and apply it to this situation? Often, there is not a single way to complete a task at work, so giving students a greater level of agency helps prepare them for the professional environment and encourages them to use their best judgment. Enabling independent choice can also help with engagement and application.

Some subjects do not have a clear, single profession at the end. Even vocational subjects such as Education, Law, and Engineering lead to a diverse range of roles. In these situations, you may choose to focus on the professional skills side, but you could also allow students to choose the context and industry to which they apply the assessment. If you opt for the latter, you will need to allow students appropriate time to research and prepare in relation to their selected industry. It may even be beneficial to include a small summative or formative assessment where students select and present their chosen profession for approval ahead of the larger piece of work.

Next, decide on your approach and ensure this is applied holistically throughout your course or module. Consistency and familiarity are essential in fostering a learning community in which your students feel comfortable and positive, giving them the confidence to challenge themselves in the learning and assessments. To achieve this holistic approach, always think about how teaching and learning activities link back to your context. This approach should also apply to your assessments, and you need to consider how you’ll frame your assessments, both in terms of communicating the assessment to your students, but also the nature of the feedback you’ll provide. Problem-based learning, for example, requires multiple checkpoint and opportunities for feedback to help ensure students are on the right track, supporting them in finding their own method or solution for the problem with which you have presented them. Overall, it’s important to think of adding authenticity to all aspects of the curriculum, not just our summative assessment. By providing modelled, structured, well-framed authentic learning opportunities which mirror outputs expected by the end of the module, students will learn, develop and succeed more effectively during their summative assessment.

• Problem-based learning lends itself particularly well to authentic teaching, learning, and assessment.
• Are there any approaches that reflect practice within related industries?
• Provide contextualised support throughout the module.
• What type of assessment will it be? Does it have multi-modal outputs and/or AI use?
• How will you balance formative and summative opportunities to provide rich dialogue and development approaches?
• Will there be several checkpoints throughout the course which enable students to submit small parts of assessments for informal feedback?

An essential part of deciding on your assessment is determining the output and communicating this clearly to your students. This is not always straight-forward, particularly if you are allowing students to select from a range of multi-modal outputs. In this situation, its essential to provide clear assessment and marking criteria and clear guidance on different tariffs for different output types (i.e. what would the suitable equivalent presentation or podcast length be in lieu of a 2,000-word report?). Providing good (and also ideally poor) examples of outputs are invaluable in helping students to understand what is expected of them. Authentic assessment also encourages students to reflect on their own understanding and experience. Build in opportunities for such reflection and the discussion or sharing of different lived experiences: this can transform a straight-forward assessment where you would expect to see similar responses from students into something far more individual and authentic.

AI is also a prominent aspect of teaching, learning and assessment in HE at this time. AI is being embedded into the day-to-day working practices of almost all industries. It’s therefore highly important that we set our students up for success by equipping them with the AI skills they’ll need to succeed in the professional environment beyond their degree. Not every assessment has to include AI, but due consideration should be given as to how AI might support and enhance an assessment. This is particularly pertinent in authentic assessment, when the goal is to reflect and support our students in learning working practices. Once you have determined (if at all) the way(s) in which AI will be included in an assessment, you need to clearly communicate this to your students; setting clear boundaries for what is acceptable use and what is inappropriate. Again, teaching the skills in advance and providing examples here are key to setting and managing student expectations, just as you would with any other technology or software incorporated into an assessment.

• Provide clear assessment criteria. Students should be clear on how different elements will look in order to meet these criteria.
• You should provide a clear idea of what a good output looks like, including, if any, what limitations and/or restrictions are in place. You can link back to your action-based verbs here to ensure constructive alignment.
• Does your output encourage the use of multimodal approaches?
• Does it involve reflection and metacognition opportunities to tie it to their own experiences?
• If they are allowed to use AI what will this look like?

In addition to your assessment, you need to think about marking and feedback. Authentic assessment is not different to any other assessment approach in that it needs a clear rubric with a clearly defined set of marking criteria. You may wish to communicate goals to your students in a way that reflects industry standards and practice, but it’s important to make sure a rubric is also available to students so that they can clearly see what they’re aiming for and understand what needs to be done to move up to the higher grade boundaries. Mapping industry skills to marking criteria can be particularly beneficial for helping learners to see how elements of the assessment relate to real-world practices and help them understand what high-quality work looks like beyond the HE environment.

You should also think about how you want to deliver feedback. Personalised, actionable feedback is essential, but consider whether there are industry practices or real-world approaches to feedback that you could embed as part of the overall assessment design.

• Produce and provide access to clear rubrics with clear intentions (see rubric design). This will enable students to know what they are aiming for.
• Assessment for learning should be built into all courses, this will give students the opportunity to try and develop skills via formative methods before undertaking the summative assessment.
• Clear links to industry and skills tested should be related to reinforce graduate outcomes and employability oversight.