Abstract
Higher education institutions face many demands in providing inclusive, well-rounded educational environments that positively impact students from diverse backgrounds and with varied lived experiences. Examples of this include representing diverse perspectives and under-represented scholars in the materials they provide (Tsourapas, 2020), and following principles of diversity and inclusion in their workforce recruitment (Fradella, 2018). Such practices ensure that students from all backgrounds feel represented by key figures in their higher education environment. Another demand is embedding regular formative assessment and feedback, allowing teachers to gather information about current student performance and identify provisions for furthering learning (Morris et al., 2021). Whilst both have become education ‘hot topics’ in recent years, more work is needed to feed principles of inclusivity and representation into the design and implementation of assessment and feedback – an emerging focus in recent research (e.g., Tai et al., 2023a, 2023b). In this piece, I argue that these two areas of practice can work in parallel to provide learning and assessment environments that are rigorous, inclusive and promote equity in student development. A worked example will be presented for stakeholder co-production in formative assessment design and delivery, for a course on neurodiversity.
Keywords: Inclusive assessment; Stakeholder co-production; Formative feedback; Neurodivergent students; Higher education
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