Practice Matters: Issue 8
Welcome to the eighth issue of QAA’s Practice Matters. Practice Matters is designed to support educators with quick and actionable enhancements across major themes affecting higher education, such as futureproofing assessment and curriculum redesign.
In September 2026 QAA hosted the second Assessment and Feedback Roadshow, which forms part of our work on futureproofing assessment: enabling the design of authentic, inclusive and AI-aware assessment that balances innovation with academic integrity and maintains confidence in standards. Over five days we had 24 presentations from a wide range of providers across the UK, sharing a wealth of innovation and enhancements in assessment and feedback. You can catch up with or revisit session recordings on our dedicated event page. Individual links are also detailed at the bottom of this page.
This bumper issue draws on the range of practice showcased at the roadshow. We have captured this practice into quick-read sets of reflective questions and top tips, organised into 5 priority themes: structures of enhancement; authentic assessment; briefs, rubrics and descriptors; audiovisual approaches; and feedback and feedforward.
Structures of enhancement
A key message from multiple presentations is that the future of assessment enhancement lies not in redesigning individual assessments, but in building institutional structures that enable inclusive, authentic, evidence-informed and collaborative assessment ‘ecosystems’ to flourish. An assessment ecosystem is "the interconnected assessment experience students encounter across a programme", designed to take into account the importance of such factors as integrity - see this opening presentation from the Roadshow for more!
Reflective questions
-
How coordinated are efforts to enhance assessment across your programme, school, or faculty?
-
How well do teaching staff know how to use available data to produce inform evidence-based enhancements?
Top tips
-
Design assessment at programme and ecosystem level, mapping assessment, feedback, workload, skills development and graduate outcomes across the whole programme to identify duplication, overload and any missed opportunities for progression.
-
Create regular staff spaces for assessment dialogue. Structured opportunities such as assessment labs, benchmarking exercises and communities of practice can accelerate assessment enhancement through discussing practice, sharing challenges and testing ideas.
-
Build inclusion into assessment from the start, rather than relying on adjustment afterwards. Consider flexibility, optionality, negotiated alternatives, accessible guidance and multiple ways for students to demonstrate achievement.
-
Strengthen assessment literacy for both staff and students. Support staff with interpreting data, redesigning assessment and evaluating innovation; support students with guidance on assessment expectations, how to use feedback, and AI-supported learning.
-
Align policy, quality processes and enhancement activity through institutional frameworks to produce embedded and lasting change. This can help foster assessment enhancement as a shared responsibility.
Authentic assessment
The most powerful and compelling assessments focus on what graduates should be able to do: solve problems, communicate professionally, collaborate, exercise judgement and reflect on practice. While presenters acknowledged that there are different understandings of 'authentic assessment', which may also depend on the subject context, there was agreement that authentic tasks connect students with real challenges, real people, and real consequences, while ensuring that appropriate scaffolding, reflection, inclusivity, and academic rigour remain at the heart of the learning experience.
Reflective questions
- Have you taken full advantage of how ‘authentic’ an authentic assessment can be, and how external parties can be involved?
- How much time and space do you give students to learn and understand the requirements for a given authentic assessment?
- Are you overly focused on the assessment product?
Top tips
- Design assessments around real-world practice and purpose, mirroring the kinds of activities graduates will undertake in professional, civic, or discipline-specific settings. These should allow students to produce work that has a genuine purpose
beyond earning marks.
- Involve industry partners, employers, alumni, community organisations and professional experts as mentors, coaches, clients and feedback providers, not just as audiences.
- Scaffold student experience with authentic assessment with exemplars, rehearsal opportunities, formative feedback, clear assessment criteria, and structured support before tackling high-stakes assessment activities.
- Prioritise authentic processes as well as authentic outputs, such as client management, teamwork and co-creation, stakeholder engagement, pitching ideas, responding to challenge, negotiating differing viewpoints, and working to external deadlines.
- Maintain academic standards while embedding authenticity – assessment criteria should continue to evaluate evidence, critical thinking, disciplinary knowledge, and scholarly judgement, even when external partners may focus more on practical usefulness or implementation.
Briefs, rubrics and grade descriptors
Presenters across the week emphasised the importance of getting right the key information provided to students about their assessments. Fundamentally, assessment criteria should function as a learning infrastructure rather than simply mark justification. Effective briefs, rubrics and grade descriptors make standards visible, support dialogue, develop assessment literacy and help students understand not just how they were judged, but how they can improve.
Reflective questions
- Are the assessment criteria being used meaningful to the subject matter and specific assessment type?
- Are your rubrics and criteria written for the marker, or the learner?
- Where is all relevant assessment information located?
Top tips
- Contextualise generic institutional criteria and descriptors for your discipline / programme, and then adapt these into clear assessment-specific expectation so students understand what success looks like in the task they are completing and subject they are studying.
- Replace vague descriptors with observable actions, capabilities or achievements. For example, instead of ‘good analysis’, consider ‘analyses relationships between ideas and evaluates alternative perspectives’.
- Design rubrics as learning tools, not marking tools. Students need to work with criteria throughout the assessment process. Consider pre-submission assessment literacy practices such as self-assessment, peer review and discussion and application of criteria, and post-submission practice of using rubric language in feedback and reflecting on strengths and next steps.
- Use exemplars and 'unexemplars', engaging students in marking strong and deliberately flawed examples to help make hidden standards visible.
- Present assessment information in one clear, accessible place – it does not help students when assessment briefs, rubrics and criteria, AI guidance, exemplars and other supporting documents are scattered across multiple online locations.
Audiovisual approaches
We are seeing a rise in the use of, and sector discussion around, audiovisual assessment. Presenters stressed that this form of assessment works best when it is authentic, accessible, dialogic and developmental. Video and podcasting activities are not primarily about the technology and should not simply replace written assignments. They should be used to foster reflection, feedback literacy, critical thinking, professional communication and student agency while preparing learners for increasingly digital and AI-enabled professional environments.
Reflective questions
- Have you given your students enough time to learn the technical components before embarking on substantive summative assessment?
- Have you thought through the full potential of an audiovisual assessment format?
Top tips
- Introduce low-stakes or formative audio or visual activities before students progress to high stake summative assessment. This way they can develop technical and communication skills early, allowing summative assessment to focus on learning outcomes
rather than production challenges.
- Design audiovisual assessment to create opportunities for reflection, discussion and evaluative judgement, not simply content submission. This way students can learn more from actively giving, receiving and acting on feedback.
- Make audiovisual assessments authentic, mirroring real-world professional practices and involving external audiences to enhance student engagement and employability skills.
- Create tasks that require students to communicate in their own voice, make creative decisions and collaborate with peers to develop student agency and AI-resilient skills.
Feedback and feedforward
Reflective questions
- How do you ensure students understand the purpose of feedback, and know how to take it forward?
- How do you follow up with students after they have received their feedback?
- Are students receiving a consistent approach to feedback across their programme?
Top tips
- Focus on feedforward- feedback for future performance. Be explicit about how students can apply learning to upcoming assessments, modules, and professional contexts.
- Make assessment, feedback and reflection a continuous cycle so that students actively engage with and action their feedback, both formative and summative. Structured reflection activities can be built into module delivery and tutorial systems.
- Make use of multiple sources of feedback, such as tutors, peers, external partners, employers and professional experts, and even carefully guided AI tools. This can develop evaluative judgement and a broader and richer understanding of quality work.
- Develop programme-level approaches to feedback, mapping key skills, learning outcomes and assessment criteria across modules and levels, to help students transfer learning rather than treating each assessment as a stand-alone task.
Resources
Structured Enhancement
- Assessment Lab: Creating space for innovation, experimentation, and collaboration in assessment and feedback University of Warwick
- Driving and designing authentic and flexible assessment 'the Manchester Met way' Manchester Metropolitan University
- A future‑ready assessment ecosystem University of Law
- Inclusive assessment as a catalyst for institutional change: A cross-school case study of curriculum enhancement University of the Arts London
- Beyond deficit models: Reducing awarding gaps through data-informed assessment reform Birmingham City University
- Transforming assessment for authentic learning: Institutional and sector-wide approaches to assessment enhancement Edinburgh Napier University
Authentic Assessment
- The impacts of authentic assessment University of Bedfordshire
- Futureproofing assessment: Authentic, inclusive and AI-aware approaches University of Westminster
- Debating for belonging: Using assessment to foster co-creation, community, and skills development University of Glasgow
- Enhancing authenticity and learner engagement through assessment-conference mapping: A reflective case study Buckinghamshire New University
- Authentic assessment at scale: How the Marketing Agency transforms learning, feedback, and local impact University of Portsmouth
- Authentic assessment through partnerships: Using industry, live briefs and RKE to transform student experience Hartpury University
- Enhancing assessment and programme design in the AI era SOAS, University of London
Briefs, rubrics and grade descriptors
- "We do not know what success looks like for this assessment": Conducting a university-wide review of rubrics with student partners King’s College London
- From assessment design to assessment literacy: Developing a coherent assessment ecosystem University of Bath
- From grading artefacts to learning infrastructure: Co-creating competency-based assessment descriptors for inclusive learning York St John University
- "Unexemplars" An easy tool for whole-class flipped assessment which removes marking and enhances student outcomes University of Lincoln
Audiovisual approaches
- Developing critical, reflective learners: Case studies in AI-informed assessment and educational podcasting Coventry University London
- Using content creation to build skills and AI-resilient assignments Richmond American University London
- Supporting AFHEA success through video-based formative assessment University of Aberdeen
Feedback and Feedforward
- The assessment–feedback cycle: Practical tools for consistency, clarity, and student success University of Roehampton
- From feedback to feed-forward: Connecting learning across assessments and years of study Nottingham Trent University
- Feedback as data: Developing adaptive feedback processes through coding University of Glasgow
- Enhancing formative feedback through generative AI and international peer learning University of the West of England Bristol