How could assessment inclusively consider the diversity of students? In higher education, the most common answer is: through individual assessment accommodations. Inclusive assessment design has also been promoted to foster accessibility for all students. However, both of these approaches have largely drawn on the procedural understanding of ‘inclusion’ as ‘enhanced academic outcomes’. In this conceptual study, a critical, socio-political approach to inclusive assessment is taken instead, considering assessment in its wider context of academic ableism. The rationale for Assessment for Inclusion (AfI) is formulated to harness assessment to promote the inclusion of marginalised students as fully accepted, agentic members of academic communities. Five practical principles for promoting AfI are introduced: rethinking accommodations, anti-ableist work, celebration of human diversity, student partnership, and interdependence. This study suggests that if mass higher education truly wishes to include students from increasingly diverse backgrounds, assessment needs to be rethought from the viewpoint of inclusion.

E-assessment typically seeks to improve assessment designs through the use of innovative digital tools. However, the intersections between digital technologies and assessment can be seen as increasingly complex, particularly as the sociotechnical perspectives suggest assessment must be relevant to a digitally-mediated society. This paper presents an organising framework, which articulates this nuanced relationship between the digital and assessment design. It draws together literature from diverse domains, including educational technologies, assessment pedagogies and digital literacies. The framework describes three main purposes for designing the digital into assessment: 1) as a tool for improvement; 2) as a means to develop and credential digital literacies; and 3) as a means to develop and credential uniquely human capabilities. Within each purpose, it offers considerations for assessment and feedback design. In addition, it offers researchers analytical tools to understand the role of the digital in assessment. The framework seeks to connect assessment and feedback design to the digital world, and in so doing ensure that higher education will be relevant for graduates’ digital futures.

Student agency is often mentioned as a key feature of feedback practices. Commonly, the concept of agency is used to refer to students’ active role in the process of seeking, receiving, generating and acting upon feedback information. However, the notion of what student agency means is often taken for granted and rarely elaborated. The feedback literature has also mainly focussed on agency within individualised and psychological paradigms of feedback. In this paper we argue that a more sophisticated view of students’ role in feedback processes is needed. We identify four theoretical frameworks of student agency that reach beyond the individual – ecological, authorial, sociomaterial and discursive – as well as the implications of each of these frameworks for feedback. We further argue that a deeper understanding of student agency as a socio-cultural and -political construct is vital in the ‘new paradigm’ of learner-centred feedback. The paper serves as a basis for future empirical studies on feedback practices to adopt a more nuanced understanding of student agency.

Authentic assessment aligns higher education with the practices of students’ future professions, which are increasingly digitally mediated. However, previous frameworks for authentic assessment appear not to explicitly address how authenticity intersects with a broader digital world. This critical scoping review describes how the digital has been designed into authentic assessment in the higher education literature. Our findings imply that the digital was most often used to enhance assessment design and to develop students’ digital skills. Other purposes for designing the digital into assessment were less present. Only eight studies situated the students within the wider context of digital societies, and none of the studies addressed students’ critical digital literacies. Thus, while there are pockets of good practice found within the literature, the vast majority of the studies employed the digital as an instrumental tool for garnering efficiencies. We suggest that in order to fit its purpose of preparing students for the digital world, the digital needs to be designed into authentic assessment in meaningful ways.

This study examines the underlying mechanisms of ableism and disablism in the assessment of student learning in higher education. Globally, higher education institutions rely strongly on assessment accommodations (e.g., extra time in tests) to ensure disabled students’ participation in assessment. This is also the case in Finland. Even though research on disabled students’ experiences of assessment has repeatedly shown that both assessment and assessment accommodations cause barriers for disabled students’ inclusion, critically oriented research on this topic has been scarce. In this study, the frameworks of ableism and disablism are used to unveil how assessment is predominantly designed for “the ideal, able student” and how disabled students are framed as “the Other” through assessment. This work is based on an analysis of 139 disabled students’ experiences of assessment and assessment accommodations as collected through an open-ended, institution-wide survey at a Finnish university. The findings reveal the profound role of assessment in excluding and marginalizing disabled students as unfit to take part in the testing cultures of academia. The accommodation model is shown to hold disabled people responsible for their own exclusion. Disablism is identified in students’ experiences of outright discrimination, such as teachers denying access to assessment accommodations when they are officially granted. This study offers a novel, critical means of discussing assessment from the viewpoints of diversity and inclusion. It also proposes future trajectories for anti-ableist assessment approaches that understand diversity as enriching, rather than obscuring, assessment.