Currently reading Zeivots et al. (2026) on “Assessment design through co-design: reimagining assessment design practices in higher education”

When browsing Zeivots et al. (2026)’s article “Assessment design through co-design: reimagining assessment design practices in higher education“, one sentence caught my eye: “Students could see how their input mattered without the expectation that every suggestion would be enacted“. Since I am currently really interested in partnership and negotiations there, I then had to read the whole thing more carefully…

Zeivots et al. (2026) describe assessment design as traditionally a lonely experience for the teacher, so they are trying something else: four different co-design activities!

• Workshops with teachers, educators, learning designers and industry partners, in a first one with former students to reflect on what was, and then in a second one with current students for feedback on changed assessments (I am wondering though why there wasn’t a  continuity in students — wouldn’t that be much more meaningful for them?). These workshops helped instructors understand better how students think about assessment and what kind of explanations they might need to understand what the instructor is aiming for, and it helped bring the idea of partnership to life. What I quote above, “Students could see how their input mattered without the expectation that every suggestion would be enacted“, is from that context.
• Weekly student reflections provided by employed student partners that fed back as feedback into the course and helped teachers understand the real student experience, which they used to either immediately adjust or plan future improvement — both in assessment design, but also in timing and communication. Student reflections were so appreciated that one instructor started doing them in a course outside of the study! But also students describe them as useful to “keep track of what’s going on“.
• Academic capacity-building workshops on different facets of assessment (frameworks, theory, design, AI) and reflection to cultivate “sayings (shared professional language around assessment), doings (new design actions and experiments) and relatings (trust, collegiality and safe dialogue)“. The workshops were helpful for reflection on current approaches and alternatives to those, and to learn from peers, and they resulted in concrete changes to assessment practices.
• Student testimonial videos with peer-to-peer advice, which were initially meant to help incoming students, and they did, since “hearing peers explain experiencing challenges conveyed that learning is iterative and that help-seeking is legitimate“. But they were also valuable for instructors to understand how students think about assessment, which helped them with how they later framed them.

Based on their experience, Zeivots et al. (2026) present three “provocations”:

• “Repositioning assessment design as an educational practice“, so instead of thinking of assessment as a one-off (or annual) event, thinking of it as an ongoing process way beyond the exam: “assessment improvement involves not only developing and revising tasks but also intentionally reshaping non-task aspects of the educational setting that are within an instructor’s sphere of influence“, for example improving communication with and between students, changing learning activities and resources, and developing their own practice.
• “De-centring assessment design: towards a relational, negotiated practice“, so again, focussing on the shared process: “This shift moves beyond adding more voices at the table but rather reimagines how the table is constructed. Institutions must consider not only what is designed, but who decides, who is affected and what values underpin those decisions. This requires challenging the practice architectures that keep assessment design detached from broader questions of learning, equity and purpose “
• “Sustainability of assessment design practices” — to achieve that even when life gets busy or courses are handed from one instructor to the next, institutional choice architecture needs to be supportive of the practice: there needs to be enough time, policy support, recognition, and professional development in order to move from a project-based co-creation to systemic change.

I found this article super interesting! It really expanded the way I think about co-creating assessment. For me, the most obvious way to do that was what Kjersti describes here: the teacher suggesting learning outcomes and negotiating with students how they are weighted, possibly including a couple of open ones or choosing from a selection. While that is direct negotiation, I really appreciate the more subtle co-creation suggested here, too, and it is always good to consider different approaches. Zeivots et al. (2026) conclude that “[i]f assessment communicates what learning is valued, then assessment design communicates what teaching is valued. Co-design offers a pathway towards alignment between the two, making assessment less of a measure and more of a living practice.” Fully agree!

Thanks to the algorithm on the journal’s website, next to this article, another one caught my eye: Zeivots et al. (2025) on “Co-design practice in higher education: practice theory insights into collaborative curriculum development“. So quick summary of that one, too:

This article, like the previous one, also uses practice architectures (which I have called choice architectures above, not sure if that is exactly the same concept, but I am just assuming it is something like walking through IKEA and realizing that you need all this stuff you didn’t know existed, or how you can nudge people towards healthy choices by putting the sugar snaps right next to the cash register) and aims to understand how it influences how people act.

Zeivots et al. (2025) describe different co-design projects, for example on how communication is hindered by misunderstandings of, for example, the technical skills required to do something on a Learning Management System, resulting in a teacher stalling on changes to the LMS and then trust in the system and each other needing to be built: “features of material-economic arrangements can undermine trust in each other and in systems“.

What I appreciate about this article is that it highlights the practical details that can make or break co-creation: Personal relationships, confidence in technical skills, time pressure, and understanding it as “emergent and unfolding at the living interface between institutional and project-specific aspects“. I also find it really relevant that the authors highlight that “co-design practice offers scope to foster professional learning in curriculum development processes“. So it is not just beneficial in terms of improving teaching in a specific course, but also to improve capacity in the organisation through “up-skilling” individuals involved in the process, and also diffusion of innovation towards others. But not only that: co-design also “involves coming to practise differently as individuals who orient their work towards others in collective projects where they ‘become together’“, thus developing the whole organisation. So maybe, just maybe, I should be more patient in a co-creation process that I am currently involved in and that is just maddingly sloooow…

Zeivots, S., Sun, J. Z., Kennedy, A., Cram, A., & Liao, Y. (2026). Assessment design through co-design: reimagining assessment design practices in higher education. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2026.2643341

Zeivots, S., Hopwood, N., Wardak, D., & Cram, A. (2025). Co-design practice in higher education: practice theory insights into collaborative curriculum development. Higher Education Research & Development, 44(3), 769–783. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2024.2410269

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