Facilitating programme-level change in higher education

This chapter describes a holistic view on assessment by looking at the programme level of assessment. In programmatic assessment, individual assessment activities are only meant for feedback, not for decision-making on learner progress. This assessment approach leads to a constant stream of meaningful assessment information. When sufficient assessment information is gathered, it is subsequently aggregated to an overview of acquired competences and learning outcomes of the educational programme, and high-stakes promotion decisions can be taken. Learners are guided by mentors in self-analysing the assessment data. A number of implementations of programme assessment have been realised over the last decade. Research and experience show that programmatic assessment can function as a catalyst for learning and enable robust high-stakes decisions.