CRADLE Seminar Series: Gordon Joughin
12 April 2016
On 12 April 2016, CRADLE hosted a seminar by Dr. Gordon Joughin, ‘Designing assessment: Hidden enemies and how to overcome them’. In his seminar, Dr. Joughin discussed research into decision-making and unconscious psychological factors that impede good decisions when planning assessment tasks. Dr. Joughin emphasised that in designing assessments, as in many things in life, our decisions are often influenced by factors we are not aware of but which nevertheless can have a profound impact on our conclusions. For instance, the strong pull of the status quo is one such factor. The seminar detailed some of the more critical factors that usually go unnoticed in decision-making, how to recognise them, and how to deal with them when we make decisions about assessment tasks.
Dr. Joughin is a higher education consultant working with CRADLE on decision-making in assessment. He is a former Director of the Teaching and Educational Development Institute (TEDI) at the University of Queensland and has published extensively on assessment and learning in higher education, including editing Assessment, Learning and Judgement (Springer, 2009). His current research considers decision-making theory in assessment design and the nature of the spoken work in oral assessment.
