Harnessing assessment and feedback to assure quality outcomes for graduate capability development: a legal education case study

In recent times, employers, graduates, government and professional bodies have all called upon tertiary educators to embrace a notion of graduate quality that is concerned, not just with knowledge acquisition, but equally with how to use and what to do with that discipline knowledge once acquired. Legal educators have also responded to this stakeholder mood. Under two Teaching and Learning Large Development Grants, the QUT Law Faculty has been progressing an integrated and incremental approach to the development of both generic and discipline-specific capabilities in core undergraduate curriculum. Particularly, the challenge has been to ensure the alignment of assessment and feedback practices with the revised course goals and identified learning objectives. This paper will detail the formulation of a coherent, incremental and holistic framework that has been mapped onto law curriculum for the teaching, learning and assessment of embedded capabilities. It will outline the intent and methods of curriculum design for more authentic learning and assessment tasks. It will also examine some of the implications and issues that arise for tertiary education and educators when the academy embraces graduate capability development as an aspect of graduate quality and embarks on, what is essentially, wholesale curriculum review committed to assuring that these broader learning outcomes are directly linked to course assessment and feedback methods supportive of this new learning.