NCSEHE grant success for CRADLE team!

18 August 2020

We’re delighted to announce that CRADLE researchers Dr Joanna Tai, A/Prof. Rola Ajjawi and Prof. Margaret Bearman, together with Deakin University’s Dr Mary Dracup and CQU’s Dr Joanne Dargusch and Lois Harris, are among the 17 teams to be funded as part of the 2020/21 NCSEHE Research Grants Program. Their project, ‘Re-imagining exams: How do assessment adjustments impact on inclusion?’, will explore the broader context of, and barriers and enablers to, inclusive assessment design in exams – Jo tells us a little more about the project below. Congratulations all!

Dr Joanna Tai

It was very exciting to hear from NCSEHE that our grant proposal was one of 17 selected out of a record 103 projects to be funded. I’d been working on the proposal with a stellar team – colleagues at CQU Joanne Dargusch and Lois Harris, as well as CRADLE’s own Rola Ajjawi, Margaret Bearman, and Mary Dracup – for over a month, carefully refining the area we wanted to focus on within the broad scope and possibilities of research for equity, and envisaging ways we could achieve meaningful outcomes for students within the envelope of a one-year project. Our grant hopes to re-imagine exams, through exploring the impact that adjustments have on students’ experiences of inclusion.

You might be wondering “why exams?”. It all started when I attended a Deakin Community of Practice meeting on inclusion and diversity (run by Mary Dracup!): I realised that, while we talk a lot about inclusion in the curriculum, assessment was perhaps being left to one side. This seemed a little illogical since assessment has a significant impact on student success, so I wanted to find out more about the current state of play. With the help of Merrin McCracken, Deakin’s estimable manager of Access & Inclusion, we took a look at our institutional data on assessment adjustments. It turns out that a large proportion of access plans did include assessment-related adjustments, and that most of these related to exams. While extensions, or extra time, might seem a reasonable way to account for varying conditions and situations that impact on a student’s ability to complete an assessment task in the “standard” way, surely we can find better ways to design assessment?

Furthermore, while some students are adept at seeking these adjustments at their institution, there are also many students who don’t access adjustments: this might be because they don’t have the “right” documentation, they don’t think their situation warrants adjustments, or even that they don’t want to be seen as obtaining an “unfair” advantage over other students to complete their work (Grimes 2019). By exploring what doesn’t work for inclusiveness in exams, we also have the opportunity to design assessments that can account for diversity in the student population: assessment that better serves students in terms of where they want to go and who they want to become. I’m relatively certain that there are many ways in which assessments might unintentionally not be inclusive as well – and hopefully our work will be able to uncover some of this, so we can do things better in the future.

We are hoping to share the outcomes of this work progressively as they happen, as well as undertaking more formal dissemination strategies such as conference presentations and journal publications. So keep an eye out here on the CRADLE blog, and on Twitter, for updates over the coming year. We’re keen to work with students and academics on the re-imagining part (unfortunately just at Deakin and CQU) – so look out for recruitment calls in the near future!