Leadership Toolkit

The main issues

In an undergraduate context, the comprehensive assessment of student leadership is hard.  Factors such as large classes and curriculum content in many cases limit the opportunity for students to learn and practise leadership and teamwork in class. 

Not all students have the opportunity to be leaders as undergraduates, but most will be leaders at different times in their lives.  Not all the things you teach students about leadership can be assessed at university, because they simply cannot be practised or implemented until the students graduate.  It is hard to provide authentic learning tasks about leadership for students without a particular practice-based context, and it is even harder to design authentic assessment tasks.  What's more, some students could be disadvantaged if individual leadership achievement were to be assessed, without the guarantee of equal opportunities to demonstrate achievement. 

However, certain aspects of leadership can be assessed.  Students can research and write about leadership; they can produce reflective documents about their own experience of leadership; they can give presentations on leadership; and, in limited ways, they can enact role plays about leadership in the classroom, to mention just a few examples.  Most of the examples provided relate, appropriately, to student's awareness of leadership, and therefore are more formative than summative. 

Each of the Toolkits addresses in some way an aspect of leadership in its Assessment section. To avoid overlap with this material, hyperlinks are provided where relevant.

Some useful examples on assessing group work can be found at:

Centre for the Study of Higher Education.
Assessing Group Work.
Retrieved from the World Wide Web on 30 October, 2006:
http://www.cshe.unimelb.edu.au/assessinglearning/03/group.html

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