Assessment professional development courses for university teachers: a nationwide analysis exploring length, evaluation and content

Abstract

Abstract The design and implementation of assessment is one of the main challenges for university teachers, who claimed needing more and better professional development courses in such area. Our study aimed to analyse at a nationwide level how public universities (N = 50) design and implement their assessment professional development courses and programmes. Every professional development course from Spanish public universities (N = 1627) was screened, and data from all available assessment courses (N = 82) was collected and analysed. These courses were compared in terms of total length, evaluation of the course learning results, and content knowledge covered. Regarding total length, most universities have little offer of courses, both in terms of quantity and duration. However, there are exceptions that implement longer and more intensive courses. Regarding the evaluation of the courses results, many universities do not evaluate teachers’ learning and the ones which do it tend to use passive methods such as attendance. Regarding content knowledge covered, online assessment is the most frequent topic, but important areas such as self- and peer assessment or feedback are vastly underrepresented. Our conclusion is that there is a large room for improvement in ADPC and we propose some recommendations aligned with existent literature.