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On Wednesday 21 and Thursday 22 June, the annual 24-UUrs Conference took place. This year’s theme was assessment, especially in light of the strategic plan and the subsequent updating of the Utrecht educational model: what does this mean for assessing our students? How can assessment best support student learning?

Keynotes on assessment and feedback

We kicked off the conference with a keynote by assessment expert Dominique Sluijsmans, known from ‘. She shared with us her vision on how assessment can have a proper place in a curriculum. Dominique argues that assessment is a research process into your students, a process in which you collect data focusing on a clear goal, interpret it and translate it into a valid decision about that goal. Assessment is one of the three elements of educational design and should be in constructive alignment with the other two elements: the curriculum goals and the didactics. The clearer the curriculum goals are, the more direction and quality that gives to didactics and assessment.

Assessment is a research process into your students.

To guide your students towards the moment of assessment, it is important to provide them with feedback. Dominique shared that it is important to do this in a way that students can learn from it and to teach students how to ask for feedback themselves. Renske de Kleijn took us further into the topic of feedback during her keynote. She emphasised that both the feedback provider and the feedback receiver bear responsibility in the process; a shift needs to take place from feedback receiver to feedback user.

But how do you use feedback effectively? Renske presented, among other things, the POWER question as a possible tool to help the feedback user, in which you first describe the problem (P), and already formulate possible solutions (O) of which you have weighed (W) the pros and cons, then explain which solution you would choose yourself (E) and at last ask for advice (R). In this way, the recipient actively shows how far they have already come without any help.

The feedback provider as well as the feedback receiver bears responsibility in the process.

Workshop sessions

Six different workshop sessions covered forms of assessment, different educational forms and their corresponding forms of assessment, and developments in education that may affect assessment.

Forms of assessment

Is a traditional examination actually a useful form of assessment? Nowadays, there is also an interest in alternative forms of assessment, which may even provide more valuable information about student learning, than an exam. But why then, is there still often a tendency to fall back on the exam as a form of assessment? Some of the reasons provided were that it takes time to design an alternative test, students do not always perceive an alternative as uniform, and fraud might be harder to trace. In short, there is an interest in alternative assessment forms, but there are still some snags in the design process.

Programmatic assessment was also discussed. In programmatic assessment, the focus is on learning as a continuous process instead of assessing and grading that learning. The Veterinary Medicine programme and bachelor Healthcare, Health and Society were already using this and shared their experiences. This showed above all that it is not a one-size-fits-all-concept. What was mainly conveyed was the importance of balancing data points and applying triangulation in assessment.

Educational forms and their corresponding assessment

Regarding assessment within Continuing Education (OvP), it was discussed that due to the great variation in the offer, there is also great variation in assessment. An example that was discussed was about assessing intervision between professionals: in such a case, is participation already the assessment or does it require a reflection report? Here, the following question remains essential: what do we want people to learn?

And how does assessment work within Community Engaged Learning (CEL)? In CEL, two specific learning goals emerge that are complicated to assess: personal growth and societal awareness. It was discussed here, that a focus on personal awareness might be better. Let students assess themselves and each other through observation, and above all, do not mark them with a grade.

New developments

In addition, ChatGPT was brought to attention. A few things that stood out when using ChatGPT to create assessment questions were that the questions were mainly formulated at the lower levels of and that ChatGPT cannot distinguish between main issues and side issues. In addition, it turned out that ChatGPT could not grade itself; it is a language model and not a numerical model so it cannot calculate or assess through a grade. Practising with ChatGPT was interesting and provided valuable information.

And what do open science and open education mean for assessment? To educate students with an open attitude, the university should actually become a place to practice 'learning to think'. For assessment, it was emphasised that this is why diversity of assessments is important, in line with the diversity in students and learning activities. For instance, a multiple-choice exam can provide a lot of insight, provided it is used in the right way.

Curriculum Game

In the Curriculum Game, developed by the Centre for Academic Teaching and Learning, participants could develop a curriculum by playing the game. By combining online and physical learning activities and incorporating formative and summative assessments, interesting curricula were created.

Formative assessments were chosen more often than summative assessments: not everything needs to be graded. Dominique Sluijsmans also emphasised in her keynote that you have to realise that a good grade is not always proof of learning. There are several forms of assessment that can demonstrate a student's learning, even without a grade.

In short, it was another valuable 24-UUrs Conference with lots of exchange, (informal) meeting opportunities and new insights we can actively use.