Rola Ajjawi, Professor of Educational Research at the Centre for Research in Assessment, from Deakin University, Australia on the provocations panel discussion on the topic ‘Making Assessment Meaningful’. This recording is from our 2023 MiniBash community event which was hosted in Birmingham, England.
Provocations panel: making assessment meaningful features Rola Ajjawi, Professor of Educational Research at Deakin University, offering a conceptual provocation on how universities represent student achievement and why traditional transcripts fall short.
Drawing on research in assessment, feedback, and digital education, Rola challenges the sector to rethink how learning, capability, and distinctiveness are made visible to students themselves, employers, and wider society. She argues that marks and grades obscure development across competencies such as communication, problem‑solving, and professional identity, and do little to convey what graduates can actually do.
The talk introduces the idea of persona as a way of understanding how students strategically represent themselves for different audiences, and proposes the concept of a persuasive portfolio as an alternative to the transcript. Such portfolios would combine validated evidence of achievement with student‑authored narratives, artefacts, and reflections, developed progressively across a degree and adaptable for different purposes and audiences.
The provocation invites educators to consider whether portfolio‑based approaches, digital credentials, and narrative representations of learning could better support authenticity, student agency, and meaningful portrayals of achievement in a digital world.
This talk took place at the studio, Birmingham in June 2023.