Workshop 10 Overview
Tracks
Track 5
| Monday, July 6, 2026 |
| 12:45 PM - 4:15 PM |
| Stephen Riady Centre (SRC) Seminar Room 7 Level 2 |
Details
Aim
University students often have mixed feelings about their preparedness to commence professional work (1), and this has implications for educators in terms of curriculum development and assessment design. To overcome this challenge, authenticity has been identified as a core feature of assessments (2), as it enables students to engage in cognitively challenging tasks that mirror activities/standards encountered in the workplace. Consequently, this workshop aims to define the concept of authentic assessment, discuss the benefits and challenges of implementation, and consider previously acknowledged design principles to scaffold these approaches into assessment tasks.
Focus
This workshop will focus on the provision of a practical application related to research on acknowledged frameworks of authentic learning (2, 3, 4). Participants will be encouraged to adapt these frameworks into different examples, including their own assessments, and case studies will be presented to showcase these principles in different assessment tasks (e.g., experimental design and scientific grant proposals, critical analysis and communication, group simulations of public health teams, reflective practice, evaluative judgement tasks).
Overview
The workshop is intended for educators, innovators, and learning designers that have a key role (or interest) in assessment design. It will bring together ideas and strategies from multiple discipline contexts to assess and consider authentic assessments for tomorrow’s learners.
Workshop plan
The workshop will provide the opportunity for participants to first work together to actively consider and discuss authentic assessment design, leading to the sharing of practical ideas around implementation by adapting previous design frameworks to different examples. The workshop will promote cross-disciplinary conversations, prompt reflection upon the aspects that work to optimise students’ engagement, leadership, agency, and independence that support them to become job-ready professionals, and enable attendees to leave with a concrete plan to implement an authentic assessment intervention in assignments within their own teaching.
Speaker
Dr Daniel Clarke
Senior Lecturer
University of Melbourne
Integrating authenticity into assessment design to create new experiential learning adventures and foster job readiness in students.
Biography
Dr Daniel Clarke is a Senior Lecturer in the University of Melbourne's Department of Microbiology and Immunology. He joined the Department’s academic teaching staff in 2019 after completing seven years researching host-viral interactions, with a particular interest in enhancing the immune response to better combat disease. Today, Daniel has an Education-focused role where he coordinates and teaches microbiology and immunology subjects to second- and third-year undergraduate students. He continually works to improve professional practice to provide exceptional learning experiences for students