Reading about assessment for inclusion and distinctiveness

I have had the pdf of the article ‘There was very little room for me to be me’: the lived tensions between assessment standardisation and student diversity” by Nieminen et al. (2024) open on my computer for months, but now that I am going into a week of vacations (yay!!) it’s time to close documents, or decide to read them first, so I can come back to a clean(ish) slate. And how can I not read an article with such a title? The questions of identity and assessment and diversity are so relevant when thinking about teaching for sustainability: If we assess all students in identical ways, how does that fit with at the same time wanting to prepare a diverse knowledge workforce, or more generally, to tackle the challenges we are facing? With wanting student to reinvent themselves, to become who they want to be?

So let’s start with Nieminen et al. (2024). Assessment of complex tasks — like learning in work placements in this study, or sustainability competencies — is super difficult because the problem with those tasks is diverse and there are potentially several correct, or worse no correct, responses. The goal is for students to develop a professional identity committed to continuously developing and performing “competently and legitimately in the context of the profession”. But of course, professional identity are intersecting and interacting with personal identities. In Nieminen et al. (2024), they start from two premises: Assessment is formative, and students diversity should be embraced in how we approach assessment (rather than adjusting for “outliers”).

Assessment in higher education is pseudo-standardised, especially when it comes to complex learning outcomes and settings like work placements: “Despite efforts to standardise assessment through practices such as transparent assessment criteria, grade moderation and anonymous marking, assessment relies on human judgments”. The standards against which students are measured is often developed in discussion with important stakeholders like future professional societies, employers or the government, and therefore become norms against which students measure themselves, too. But the norms are socially constructed and therefore not neutral or apolitical, and they work to homogenise students towards that norm. “In assessment, students’ full, rich and diverse identities may be suppressed and potentially marginalised.”

In their study, Nieminen et al. (2024) followed students through work placements with interviews before, during, and after. They find that assessment tasks are perceived as generic and not authentic at all, one student says “… there’s always got to be an essay in there somewhere!” to explain why a task was given that seemed like it did not support development. Students describe three ways in which assessment is standardised in a way that they perceive as limiting: with the required formats, time frames, and focus on the individual rather than the relational work they are doing. But on the other hand, students report how assessment helped them become more self-aware of their professional identity, and how it gives them reassurance that they have learnt what they were supposed to have learnt.

“Finally, we note that even if higher education institutions cannot provide inclusive assessment experiences, we see value in reframing assessment standardisation transparently as a matter of equity, inclusion and diversity, and recommend it should be recognised as such.”

So how can we do that?

Assessment for inclusion

I recently wrote about Tai et al. (2022)’s “Assessment for inclusion” which I enjoyed a lot. They provide a list of examples where traditional assessment is problematic for inclusion, go check it out!

Nieminen (2024) also writes about “Assessment for Inclusion”, specifically about “rethinking inclusive assessment in higher education”. He describes how “inclusion” is typically understood as “enhanced academic outcomes”. Traditional ways to work towards inclusion usually consider the medical model of disability (where disability is something to be fixed or to be accommodated, for example through more time for assessment). In the social model of disability, disability is created by a society that excludes people, and assessment produces disability rather than just revealing it. He discusses different purposes of assessment: certification (Assessment of Learning), learning (Assessment for Learn-ing) and sustainability (Assessment as Learning), but more recently also Assessment for social justice and, what he suggests, Assessment for Inclusion, which means “to harness assessment to promote the inclusion of marginalised students as fully accepted, agentic members of academic communities”.

Five practical principles for promoting AfI are introduced:

1. Rethinking accommodations. Assessment accommodations are very much standardised in the tools they use: for example more time, quiet room, write on a locked-down computer rather than by hand. If there were more options that could be tailored with more nuance, it would allow many more forms of participation, allowing for more agency. If assessment was more authentic, there might also be room for more authentic accommodations. If accommodations were not just diagnosed-based but considering systemic injustices, maybe there should be writing support for first generation students and lots of other support systems in place. And what if support was offered proactively, so not just for people that have a diagnosis AND are willing to disclose it AND can battle the system to get the support?

2. Anti-ableist work. Only fixing assessment practices is just dealing with the symptoms of a much bigger problem, and the roots of that can only be addressed through anti-ableist work and require systemic changes. But first it needs teacher training, demystification and normalisation of accommodations, and representation of disability in teachers and materials.

3. Student partnership. Co-creating assessment means not falling into the saviourism where we think we can fix things for students without talking to them, but instead respecting their agency and their identities.

4. Celebration of human diversity – “a way to reposition disabled students as resourceful and agentic knowers and doers of their discipline”: This is about letting students develop and celebrate their distinctiveness, for example through negotiating learning outcomes and rubrics.

5. Interdependence. If assessment is only about individual performance, it cannot authentically assess work that happens in community, therefore there is no true inclusion.

So far, so good. This leads to another open document, this one on

Authentic assessment

Based on constructive alignment being a goal in designing learning outcomes, assessment, and activities, Ajjawi et al. (2020) identify three misalignments that made assessment feel inauthentic in a work placement context:

1) Misalignment between assessment activities and future selves: Students often feel that assessment is addressing them in their role as current student rather than as future professional, especially when the goals they were asked to write early in their placements were not revisited later.

2) Misalignment between placement activities and assessment activities: Written assessment does not give students opportunities to actually show skills they have developed, whereas performance-based assessment might. Written assignments also don’t capture the collaborative skills and experiences they had gained. Assessment was perceived as something outside of, and disconnected from, what was happening in the work placement.

3) Misalignment between the university and industry: What was assessed was usually not authentic to what students did in the work place, making those experiences feel even more disconnected from what is learnt and tested in university, and university therefore feel irrelevant for real life. This could be improved by negotiating and co-creating with industry and students.

But let’s get back to another facet that fits with assessment for inclusion:

Assessment for distinctiveness

I only recently came across the term “assessment for distinctiveness”, but it resonated with me a lot. As it came up in both “assessement for inclusion” articles I read over the last coupe of days (Tai et al. (2022), and Nieminen (2024) summarised above), I have to read another one of my open documents: Jorre de St Jorre et al. (2019) on “Assessment for distinctiveness: recognising diversity of accomplishments.”. There, they definine “assessment for distinctiveness,which enables graduates’ complex and unique accomplishments to be made accessible and portrayed to those who wish to know about them, including students (who need to understand their own achievements and capabilities as they seek employment) and employers (who might offer them opportunities). ”

But they identify a lot of problems with current assessment practices:

• Lack of communication around how and why transferable skills are actually relevant
• Homogenisation, meaning no opportunity to gain “personalised evidence of achievement that differentiates them from their peers”
• All assessment bunched together in a final grade/degree, so that failure to meet learning outcomes that were compensated by excelling on others all become the same grey sauce
• Achievement is communicated in such an abstract way that it is pretty much meaningless to anyone who isn’t an insider
• Only exceptional achievement (defined in very narrow ways) is recognised as a way to distinguish a student from their cohort

So what could be done instead? Jorre de St Jorre et al. (2019) suggest

1. “Provide opportunities for demonstration of distinct and personalised achievement” This can be achieved through practical experiences in the workplace or in applied projects, and students can be involved in finding the topics and contacts to make it relevant to themselves (but, I am adding, we need to be careful so this doesn’t create a disadvantage for people who don’t have the same social capital as others). Personalised assessment requires of course more resources, but it is to some extent scalable through group projects or placements, as long as individual contributions to the groups are recognised. Students might also be invited to choose the type of product they demonstrate the learning outcome with.

2. “Use assessment to foster evaluative judgement” If students are involved in evaluating their own work, they practice evaluative judgement. Jorre de St Jorre et al. (2019) also suggest letting students “demonstrate learning outcomes through curation of achievement from different aspects of their lives (as described above [as work and carer roles, volunteering, involvement in clubs and societies]) can also be used to influence what students do to enhance and evidence their employability, their capacity to understand themselves (and their emerging professional identities) and to judge their own achievements.” This judging can happen against given standards, or be student-led.

3. “Allow for multiple portrayals of achievement for different audiences” If CVs need to look different depending on what kind of job someone applies for, why not give students that opportunity already? The suggestion here is to certify learning outcomes and let students present the big picture in any way they wish.

4. “Provide meaningful evidence of the achievement certified” One suggestion for how students can show the evidence of their learning in different ways are digital badges that students could use for example on LinkedIn.

I have to say, when I think of “assessment for distinctiveness”, my idea is different from what is presented in this article. Here, the focus is very much on employability, and while that is of course not a bad thing, my idea was much more about letting students be themselves, letting them follow their curiosity and dreams as part of their learning which they show in their assessment. I think we have to be very careful when asking students to build on their out-of-class experiences in order to not introduce enormous disadvantages for people that are maybe coming directly out of highschool compared to others who have years of work experience, or people that have the means to do interesting volunteer work compared to others that have to work a boring job at minimum wage to make ends meet. I am missing a discussion on how to make assessment for distinctiveness also assessment for inclusion in this article (but then I also just read two articles on assessment for inclusion right before, and to be fair, this article was written before either of those).

But I am left asking myself how we can do “assessment for distinctiveness” in an inclusive way? And don’t forget, I am using “inclusion” as a placeholder until I find a better term, because of what I learnt from Hedvall & Ericsson (2o24): “the problem with inclusion? It is done to someone by someone“…

Featured image: Cold dip this morning!

Ajjawi, R., Tai, J., Huu Nghia, T. L., Boud, D., Johnson, L., & Patrick, C. J. (2020). Aligning assessment with the needs of work-integrated learning: The challenges of authentic assessment in a complex context. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 45(2), 304-316.

Jorre de St Jorre, T., Boud, D., & Johnson, E. D. (2019). Assessment for distinctiveness: recognising diversity of accomplishments. Studies in Higher Education, 46(7), 1371–1382. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2019.1689385

Nieminen, J. H. (2024). Assessment for Inclusion: rethinking inclusive assessment in higher education. Teaching in Higher Education, 29(4), 841-859.

Nieminen, J. H., Dollinger, M., & Finneran, R. (2024). ‘There was very little room for me to be me’: the lived tensions between assessment standardisation and student diversity”. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 1-15.