What is assessment mapping and how can it support your RTO?

Maintaining effective assessment mapping is an integral part of the assessment process for RTOs, and is key for staying compliant.

What is assessment mapping?

Assessment mapping is the process of comparing an assessment to each part of a unit of competency, for the purpose of ensuring the assessment can effectively collect evidence across the whole unit. Assessments should be mapped against the elements and performance criteria, performance and knowledge evidence requirements, and foundation skills[1]. 

Why is assessment mapping important for your RTO?

Assessment mapping can be an extremely valuable tool for developing and reviewing assessments, and for easily showing auditors evidence of compliance. Mapping also allows assessors to easily see where learner knowledge gaps are after marking and grading.

Checking that your assessments cover the requirements of the unit and also that you are not over-assessing or under-assessing can also be made much easier by using mapping. 

Is assessment mapping required by ASQA?

ASQA states that RTOs must ‘demonstrate the validity of their assessment tools’[2]. This means that although assessment mapping isn’t explicitly expressed, mapping is crucial for achieving assessment tool validity, improving assessment processes such as developing and reviewing assessments, identifying non-compliance and more.

What functionality should your Student Management System (SMS) provide when it comes to assessment mapping? 

It’s important to to ensure that your SMS and LMS is able to provide the following functionality:

• Download qualification training components directly from training.gov.au including units, elements, performance criteria, foundation skills, performance evidence, knowledge evidence and assessment conditions
• Map your assessment questions and items to related training components, or vice versa, to create mapping relationships
• Get direct visual feedback about mapping relationships including the number of components mapped to each assessment criterion/question
• Fully export your Assessment mapping data at both the Unit and Qualification levels
  

Using mapping with online assessments

We know assessment can be tricky. Mapping ASQA’s training components to assessments to stay compliant is cumbersome, especially with paper-based assessments remaining costly and time-consuming. Online assessment can resolve all of these issues, for both theoretical and practical assessments. With benefits such as reduced administrative burden, quicker marking, cost effectiveness and easier mapping, you’ll easily forget about the days when assessments were printed, written on with ball-point pens and marked page-by-page on your desk.

Using Learning Plans is another great tool to use. Learning plans perfectly complement the mapping and compliance process, with supporting features such as:

• The ability to set up rules and dependencies for learning and assessment
• The ability to keep learning and assessments in sync with key unit and course dates
• Grouping modules of learning and assessment around related competencies or at the individual competency level

The mapping process for online assessment is a much easier and more streamlined way to ensure validity for your assessment tool, ensuring compliance with ASQA. 

References

1. In an RTO, what is assessment mapping? Do I need to do it? - The Learning Community
2. ASQA mapping
   

‍‍

To learn more about how aXcelerate’s online assessment and assessment mapping tools can help support your RTO, take a look here. 

‍