Back to the Future: Facilitating assessment design, collaboration and outcomes alignment with an assessment framework

The National Bioscience Assessment Collaboration team constructed and piloted an assessment framework for the biosciences. The framework contains five dimensions, including an adaptation of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Programme for International Student Assessment framework and physiology discipline core concepts. Pilot mapping of a 72-question physiology exam, containing multiple choice and short answer questions, showed that reliable mapping of assessment to most dimensions of the framework is possible. It also showed that the exam items were skewed on most dimensions of the framework, suggesting a bias to memory rote recall, which has previously been identified as a systemic issue across the biosciences. The assessment framework can help diagnose where assessment improvement is required in a subject or across a degree and facilitate improvements to assessment design and possible assessment collaboration and benchmarking between institutions.