Inside classrooms, we may not necessary and immediately think of the role of assessment in educational accountability.  However, the accountability elements in universities could not be missed while assessment in fact is an important component of the whole.

From quality assurance to quality enhancement

The need for quality assurance is driven by different forces in different context.  These forces are partly raised from the widening provision of Higher Education opportunity, partly from the public concern of academic standards and teaching professionalism, and also from the employability needs of the university graduates who are going to get jobs in the changing world within the knowledge-based economy. 

Putting effort for ‘continuous improvement” is the central point that teachers and policy makers are trying to address. For some cases, the improvement can be strategically made by funded learning and teaching projects with specific objectives (like what we are dong in this Assessment Project), or by regulating the standard by explicit expectations.  Furthermore, the sense of improvement-led with the developmental nature are now widely discussed and endeavored by different approaches of institutional research activities.

However, the self-regulating system of a university is a collective work of teachers, students and school administrators.  The approaches are contextual dependent and some commonly asked questions are similar:

How teachers can help students learn better?
What do they did is effective in bringing out the intended student learning outcomes?  What are those did not work that should be abandoned?
How teachers can judge the level of understandings achieved by the students in their subjects and, at the same time, can communicate the learning achievements with other stakeholders?

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