Opportunities for Leading Assessment for Inclusion: choosing a focus

In the CAULLT funded research (Harris et al 2025), we talked to both senior leaders with responsibilities for determining how policy is designed around assessment and leaders in implementation of assessment design within their contexts. This group of people privileged the direct relationships they have with students and the ongoing influence this allows. Whilst many institutional policies, strategic plans, and senior leadership priorities can affect how assessment is systematically operationalised – formal concepts of leadership – equally, implementers of assessment for inclusion had a major impact on how students experienced assessment. This could be considered a form of shared leadership, or ‘leading with license.’

Widening participation is a major goal of inclusive practice, which includes thinking of all that we do as an open and collaborative learning exercise. Hence, it is useful to reflect on what we do in our practice, rather than just focusing on student outcomes. Enabling access, ensuring inclusivity, and promoting ‘practices encouraging peer learning, collaborative knowledge creation, sharing, and empowerment of learners’ (Cronin, et al., 2023, p.147) can widen our spheres of influence over learning quality. This drive toward openness highlights the importance of sharing practice within groups and across organisational hierarchies, valuing the equitable participation of all who are involved. Inclusion is everybody’s business. However, we also know there are potential dangers of wholly shared responsibility, since it is then nobody’s job in particular. Leadership – and recognising leaders – is therefore important at all levels of organisational hierarchies.

Under the umbrella of assessment for inclusion, there are many opportunities available for leadership across all levels. Here we introduce some key themes which might resonate with personal or institutional values and which could be a focus of leadership:

• Student voice and lived realities
  • Creating reasonable timeframes and effective staff workload feedback loops
  • Gaining appropriate community engagement around how to best embed Indigenous Knowledges and learning outcomes
  • Recognising the often imperfect nature of individual accommodations / adjustments / solutions, and creating mechanisms so there’s scope for additional customisation and support to address other arising needs
  • Minimising the bureaucracy encountered, decreasing students’ needing to self-advocate
• Students as partners in collaboration
  • Creating opportunities for student collaboration in assessment design and practice
  • Providing open and transparent communication on marking criteria / rubrics
  • Giving students agency, allowing them to aim for specific levels of achievement, select particular genres or modes, and select assessments which best align with their schedules
• Digital Accessibility
  • Providing screen readers and make sure all file formats are compatible with these
  • Creating alt – text on images
  • Generating captions and subtitles for video
  • Creating consistency in formatting, font style and size, and blank space in learning and assessment materials
• Consistency of communication
  • Ensuring that language used isn’t overly abstract or theoretical / performatively academic; ‘plain language’ communication in, and about assessment.
  • Checking terminology is consistently used across all forms of feedback, delivery, written content online, and assessment
  • Verifying terminology is respectful and current in the context of the assessment and subject, including regular community feedback and review around this
• Authenticity
  • ‘License and authority to lead’ in accordance with own values
  • Checking assessments are meaningful, purposeful, and sustainable
  • Using ‘real world’ representations and scenarios within assessment
  • Linking assessments to professional skills and employability
  • Embedding realistic and diverse representations of society within assessments
  • Being culturally responsible and respectful of students’ lives and backgrounds
• Flexibility
  • Time – allowing students to ‘set their own deadlines’, get extra time easily when life does not go to plan, dip in/out based on work schedules, psychological state, etc.
  • Mode – allowing student some say in the manner in which they share knowledge (e.g., to opt for spoken instead of written, pre-recorded video (supports those with social anxiety) vs on the day spoken (may help those with tech issues who find video creation difficult)
  • Topic – allowing students to work with areas where they have interest, prior knowledge/experience, etc.

Different roles, different responsibilities

The scale of the higher education system means that there are increasingly distinctive roles required to enact quality teaching and learning. The focus in this OER on assessment has naturally centred the majority of discussion on what lecturers might do, but it is also important to acknowledge the roles of casual and sessional academics, course/program leaders, academic developers, learning designers, and more broadly, school, faculty, and senior leaders, in promoting inclusive assessment.

Casual and sessional staff

It is estimated that 50 to 80% of undergraduate teaching in universities is delivered by sessional staff (O’Kane, 2023), having significant implications for the practice of assessment for inclusion. Job insecurity and academic precarity is likely to mean a reduced risk appetite with respect to innovation (especially since poor student evaluations may mean no additional contracts). Additionally, as casual staff often sit outside the identified power structures within the university and may lack avenues for innovation (i.e., are ‘assigned’ to a course shortly before the start of the teaching period, meaning that even if assessment changes are identified, they cannot be actioned given assessment change timelines). The drive to secure further work may also mean less willingness to bend policy, since there are many reasons to want to be perceived as ‘doing the right thing’.

Furthermore, sessional staff are subject (as are many others) to strict rationing and allocation of time towards students – both in interactions and in marking of assessments. Some of the innovative designs we identified did require staff to go ‘above and beyond’, with time in workload not considering things like a) the time cost of negotiating tasks with students, b) extra marking time needed when products may be quite different, c) time to develop materials to support students to create different assessment products.  Casual staff do not have the flexibility to ‘borrow time’ from other tasks (e.g., administrative, research, service time) to devote into teaching. We cannot ask casual staff to volunteer, which is what is occurring when they are expected to do things that take more time than what they are being paid for, so budget allocations need to take any additional time costs relating to inclusive design into account.

Within these constraints, how can casual or sessional staff contribute to inclusion in assessment, being ‘at the coalface’? If you are a sessional staff member or supporting these staff, remember that without adding additional time costs, such staff can still have agency over their attitudes, language, and practices and be ready to point students in the right direction when students do need additional support at university. This means bespoke induction materials, resources, and professional development opportunities should be available to casual staff, including programs focused specifically around developing inclusive values and practices and generating awareness of student services available and how to access them. Students value interactions with staff, which could make or break their experience (Tai et al 2023), as a casual or permanent staff member, being supportive, empathetic, normalising difficulties with assessment, and encouraging students to reach out for help are all extremely important.

‘Third space’ professionals: academic developers, learning designers, disability liaison officers

Third space professionals have a powerful role to play as they operate across multiple units and programs and could act as substantial co-ordinators of inclusive assessment practice. Selecting a focus (from the many possibilities in the lists above) which aligns with university priorities can support broad impact. They might also support school, faculty and senior leaders in particular policy or institution-driven missions for educational uplift or change which could be harnessed for the purpose of improving inclusion.

The role of the diversity and inclusion team is also important, and usually encompasses an accessibility centre. Such staff might have a role in advocating for inclusive assessment, as well as offering the mechanism for ensuring students can access the accommodations they are entitled to these. These staff can also actively work to reduce barriers to accommodation access (e.g., simplify paperwork, streamline processes so outcomes are quickly achieved) and improve awareness (e.g., improve centre/lecturer communication, make sure staff are aware of what particular accommodations entail and how to set these up).

Tai et al. (2022) found that involving disability liaison officers in conversations around assessment design was illuminating for educators, who valued the deep experience from which liaison officers could draw upon to highlight how particular assessment design decisions might impact different groups of students. Importantly, these staff can help bring to light problems with particular tasks or types of tasks (e.g., identifying trends around tasks with high levels of accommodation requests) and suggest alternative designs based on knowledge of students and their needs.

Course/program directors and unit/module chairs

Inclusive assessment design and practice cannot sit with individuals such as unit coordinators: a programmatic approach to inclusive assessment design becomes essential so students have a consistent experience in relation to assessment. Keeping inclusion on the agenda is important, and at this level, it may be helpful to consider patterns of student characteristics and backgrounds within particular cohorts, to target approaches to inclusion, and offer a narrative “why” which resonates with the discipline or profession. Many leaders and educators in our research saw inclusion as being about meeting the needs of ‘all students’ versus having a narrower focus on a particular characteristic (e.g., disability, cultural background). While this broad lens is valuable, it does mean that specific student needs can get overlooked as nothing can be well suited to ‘all students’ (e.g., a spoken task may suit students with dyslexia or from cultural backgrounds which privilege oral traditions but may disadvantage students with particular forms of anxiety).

Hence, individual tasks will always prioritise some needs over others (perhaps the most visible, or those whose needs are more ‘manageable’ or easy to adjust for). Focussing on needs for specific equity groups is also important (e.g., What might First Nations students need in assessment?) but this should not lead to generalisations or homogenisations of the needs of a particular equity group.

School, faculty and senior leaders

In the CAULLT project, we identified many simple and strategic actions which senior leader took to support assessment for inclusion. These included:

• creating policy which included specific practice examples,
• monitoring digital infrastructure, making sure systems remained compatible with inclusion goals
• providing innovation incentives and awards
• considering good practice around inclusion in academic promotion criteria
• allocating additional staff time or creating workload adjustments when tasks had greater administration or marking timeframes
• promoting scholarship of teaching and learning on inclusive practice
• providing mechanisms that allow timely changes to be made to existing assessments
• adopting a more ‘hands off’ management style, empowering staff with the agency needed to innovate on assessment practices
• encouraging innovation (i.e. a flag celebrating experimental assessment design)
• volunteering to be on committees and advisory boards where decisions will be made about university policies that may impact on inclusion
• developing communities of practice and professional development opportunities

There were many examples encountered of good practice in the research. For example, one university gave staff the option to activate an ‘assessment innovation flag’ via the assessment change process when they designed something new. This ‘flag’ meant that while student evaluations were still gathered after implementation, they were considered with the knowledge that this was a new task and the expectation that there might be a level of initial dissatisfaction as students adjusted to a new way of working and/or staff experienced unforeseen challenges in the teaching of and execution of the task.

Another university had carefully considered the time costs involved in marking of tasks which required expertise in Indigenous knowledges and/or dealt with potentially sensitive content (e.g., student reflections about impacts of colonisation, racism). Here, staff were provided with some additional marking time to enable them to respond appropriately to student work.  These are just a couple of examples of practical ways leaders can encourage staff to innovate and recognise the work involved in inclusion.

Developing a university-wide approach to inclusive assessment

Within the universities involved in our research, it was also important to tackle inclusion with a whole of university approach through policy, as well as building the capability of educators across the university. Here are some of the university-wide approaches taken:

• Developing university principles that support inclusion, including a focus on Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and including all staff in the conversation about how assessment can be more inclusive,
• Providing opportunities for sharing inclusive assessment design and implementation practice examples in workshops/communities of practice led by learning designers and inclusive assessment champions (at the school/faculty/whole of university levels),
• Providing tools that staff can use to design inclusive assessment (e.g., digital accessibility tools, assessment toolboxes that include examples from a range of disciplines/other universities, checklists based on frameworks such as the UDL guidelines and ASCILITE TELT Standards to guide the design process),
• Providing policy guidance on assessment program plan designs, including a focus on the need to use a variety of assessment tasks, with limits on examinations (e.g., no more than 50 percent exams/multiple choice) except where timed assessments require students to demonstrate the learning outcomes in ways that are relevant and authentic to a profession/context,
• Supporting assessment designers to consider the types of changes at the unit level by examining what is merely historical (traditional) and what can be changed,
• Recognising inclusive practice through awards (e.g., inclusive Vice Chancellor’s award),
• Ensuring that students have access to clear and comprehensible policies that make transparent the processes involved in accessing support. This includes ensuring consistent naming of documents and webpages to facilitate easy access,
• Prioritising students as partners programs. Allowing students to have a voice in assessment design and an opportunity to provide feedback to academics on assessment design decisions.

References

Cronin, C. Havemann, L., Karunanayaka, S., and McAvinia, C. (2023). Open Educational Practices. In: Bali, Maha; Bozkurt, Aras; Dickson-Deane, Camille; Kimmons, Royce; Stefaniak, Jill E. and Warr, Melissa eds. EdTechnica: The Open Encyclopedia of Educational Technology. EdTechBooks, pp. 147–153.  https://oro.open.ac.uk/91847 

Harris, L.R., Dargusch, J., Tai, J., Funk, J., & Bourke, R. (2025). Supporting leadership in inclusive assessment policy and practice: Final report. CAULLT, Sydney, New South Wales. https://www.caullt.edu.au/project/supporting-leadership-in-inclusive-assessment-policy-and-practice/

O’Kane, M. (2023). Australian Universities Accord—Discussion Paper. Department of Education. https://www.education.gov.au/australian-universities-accord/resources/australian-universities-accord-panel-discussion-paper

Tai, J., Ajjawi, R., Bearman, M., Dargusch, J., Dracup, M., Harris, L., & Mahoney, P. (2022). Re-imagining exams: How do assessment adjustments impact on inclusion? National Centre for Student Equity in Higher Education. https://www.acses.edu.au/research-policies/assessment-adjustments-impact-inclusion-2/

Tai, J., Mahoney, P., Ajjawi, R., Bearman, M., Dargusch, J., Dracup, M., & Harris, L. (2023). How are examinations inclusive for students with disabilities in higher education? A sociomaterial analysis. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 48(3), 390–402. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2022.2077910