Meaningful Assessment in Interdisciplinary Education

Today's university lecturers are faced with the challenge of educating students to see beyond the limits of their own discipline and to come up with innovative solutions to societal challenges. Many lecturers would like to put more emphasis on teaching students how to integrate diverse forms of knowledge, work together in teams, critically reflect and become self-regulated learners. These lecturers are breaking down the silos of scientific disciplines as well as the barriers between academia and society and responding to the changing role of universities in society. Just as teaching and learning are ready for change, so is assessment. In this book, the authors call for an assessment strategy with a greater emphasis on assessment for and assessment as learning, with a focus on giving powerful feedback and the use of authentic assessment tasks as well as alignment with the intended learning outcomes and your pedagogical beliefs. If you are looking for ways to assess integration, collaboration, reflection, and critical thinking rather than only assessing the acquisition of knowledge, the examples in this handbook are inspiring initiatives that can point you to new directions in assessment.

Ilja Boor lectures for the Bachelor's program Psychobiology and is project leader Educational Innovation at curriculum level at the Teaching & Learning Center of the Faculty of Science of the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Debby Gerritsen lectures for the Bachelor's program Interdisciplinary Social Science and the interdisciplinary Research Master's Social Sciences at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Linda de Greef works at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Amsterdam. She is the programme manager at The Teaching Lab where experiments, publications, workshops, guides and methods for interdisciplinary education are developed and shared. Jessica Rodermans until recently designed and organized interdisciplinary electives, honours courses and minor programs for the Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Acknowledgments, Introduction, Why this handbook?, Structure of this handbook, , Part 1 Getting started with the assessment of interdisciplinarity, Meaningful assessment, Assessing with the right purpose in mind, Providing powerful feedback Making use of authentic assessment, Aligning the assessment with learning outcomes, Aligning the asssessment with pedagogical beliefs and values, Assessing the skills that foster interdisciplinarity, Definitions: multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary, Subskills and learning outcomes, Assessing integration, Assessing critical thinking, Assessing collaboration, Assessing reflection, Part 2 The examples How to navigate the examples 1 Assessing perspective-taking skills with a simulation game, 2 Making 'big ideas' tangible with an installation, 3 Self-assessment of boundary-crossing competences, 4 Peer feedback on the reflection of a stakeholder dialogue, 5 Experiencing the learning process using a portfolio, 6 A rubric for interdisciplinary capstone projects, 7 Making failure a learning tool for collaboration skills, 8 Evaluation of the golden principles of collaboration, 9 Reflection on teamwork and disciplinary expert roles, 10 A moot court to build critical thinking skills, 11 Authentic assessment, learning by accident, 12 Grading the contributions to class discussions, 13 Dance assessment as experiential learning, 14 Enhancing critical thinking with Perusall, 15 Co-creation of a rubric to encourage ownership of learning, 16 Peer and self-assessment for student-led activities, 17 From feed-up to feed-forward, 18 Comparative judgment as a tool for learning, 19 The co-creation of assessment criteria, 20 Reflection on interdisciplinary competences using a portfolio, Final remarks: towards new ways of assessment, Lessons learned for meaningful assessment in interdisciplinary education, Taking the next steps, Index, References, Colophon.