Words within worlds: theorising simulation, role play and genre in university assessment

This paper explores the use of innovative forms of assessment involving ‘simulation’ or role play, from both theoretical and practical perspectives. While most university assessment tasks ask students to respond as learners within their discipline, a growing number of assessment tasks across many disciplines construe the situation differently, ascribing particular identities to the writer (often professional, or ‘non-academic’) and prescribing specific contexts to the task which may also be non-academic. Hence, the ‘genre’ in which the student is assessed is also altered. Current literature on authentic assessment (Luongo Orlando, 2003), context-based learning (Williams, 2008) and situated learning (Gee, 2004) suggests that such simulated assessment contributes to the development of students’ applicable knowledge and communication strategies in both academic and professional contexts. The research on which this paper reports is based on a corpus of assessment tasks from a range of disciplines that the authors are compiling which involve simulation in some form. The paper presents specific examples from the corpus which strike the authors as being particularly innovative and imaginative in their design. In discussing these examples, the paper seeks to lay out schematically some of the situational variables that enter into the design of such tasks, including authorial role, audience, mode, genre and knowledge base. The authors argue that the value of such assessment is ultimately a ‘meta-communicative’ one: for students to be able to explore in some principled and critical way how the disciplinary expertise they are acquiring in their studies might be shaped and adapted for a range of contexts and circumstances.