Talking about skills

Talking about the skills involved in assessments

There are lots of different ways that students' skills awareness and skills literacy can be enhanced through explicit reflection on the skills involved in assessments.

For example, you can:

• Highlight the top level skills (communication, critical and creative thinking, IT and digital literacy, etc.) involved in the assessment within the assignment brief and other supporting materials, and draw students' attention to this.

• Foreground the weighting of different assessment criteria within an assignment, to demonstrate which skills and competencies are prioritised within the assessment design.

• Invite students to reflect on how the module learning outcomes and graduate attributes that are assessed by the assignment (as specified in the module descriptor) relate to specific skills and competencies.

• Introduce the assessment, and then:

a) show students a range of skills, optionally drilling down to the full range of skills and competencies within each top level skill, and ask them to vote on which of those skills they feel they will be practicing and developing in doing the assessment (good for level 4). The image below can be used for this purpose. Or,

b) simply ask students which skills they feel they will be practicing and developing by doing the assessment (good for level 5). Or,

c) ask students to think about the skills they've developed in previous learning and assessments, and ask which of these they'll be developing in doing the current assessment. This helps students make links between different learning and assessment tasks (good for level 5).

This can be taken a step further by asking students to then evaluate their current level of proficiency in these skills (e.g., elementary; novice; proficient; advanced; expert), decide which of those skills they most want to make progress with, and plan specific actions involved in the process of completing this assessment which will enable them to enhance those skills (good for level 6).

This can be taken another step further by helping students to turn these plans into S.M.A.R.T. targets (good for levels 6 and 7).

Reference to any standard programme assessment criteria which are differentiated by level (i.e., 4, 5 and 6), focusing on proficiency relative to those levels, can support this activity.