First year capstone assessments: a partnership approach to evaluating and exploring new assessment approaches

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic instigated a national lockdown across the UK in March 2020, which would go on to affect how universities could assess their students once campuses were shut down. Many institutions were looking to reduce the amount of summative assessment in the short term, but following this the sector has been considering how it can reimagine assessments that are both more futures-focused and less fraught during times of crisis (Sambell and Brown, 2022). For University College London (UCL), its approach was to cancel all first-year assessments and move them to a single capstone assessment. Like many others, UCL is keen to learn from some of the emergency measures put into place.

Through a series of focus groups with students and interviews with staff, an interdisciplinary team of staff and students undertook research to evaluate the capstone as an emergency response and the value of a capstone-style assessment in the first year in a non-emergency environment. This article focuses on the latter of these two aims. Our research highlights how capstone assessments can support students to make better links between modules and their real-world relevance. We also put forward the idea that first year capstones can offer a more mature form of assessment that helps students explore and apply what they are learning.

In addition, this paper explores the value of a partnership approach to evaluative research of assessment. Given the calls for the sector to take this opportunity to make wide-scale changes to assessment practices, we believe that students should be empowered to partner with us during that process. With them, we can learn what worked, decide the elements we want to retain and set up conversations about the future of assessment, thus exemplifying the democratising of assessment practices as advocated by Deeley and Bovill (2017). As such, students were integral to the research process, contributing equally to the design, data gathering, analysis and recommendations. The learning from working with students in this way has already been felt across similar projects at UCL and we argue that working with our students to understand current challenges can lead to greater resilience in the face of huge change in the sector.