Scaffolding unfamiliar assessments: evaluating the effectiveness of student support for policy writing assessments

Policy writing assessments (PWAs), such as policy briefs and position papers, are widely used in Politics and International Studies as an alternative to traditional essays and exams. This has been accompanied and supported by scholarship that highlights a range of potential benefits of PWAs, particularly as ‘authentic assessments’ that model workplace tasks and can aid in improving graduate employability, and as ‘assessments as learning’ that help students to learn how to analyse ill-defined political problems under uncertainty. While there is a clear case for using PWAs, there is no consensus on how much or what forms of support to provide students undertaking these assessments for the first time. While some studies argue in favour of extensive guidance and specialist policy writing support, others argue in favour of minimal guidance to encourage creativity and critical thought. To the best of our knowledge, there have been no previous attempts to empirically examine the effectiveness of these approaches to supporting students. This paper aims to address this gap by examining different approaches across a selection of advanced undergraduate and taught postgraduate Politics and IR courses at the University of Glasgow. Through a quasi-experimental design and using pre- and post-assessment questionnaire data, we examine the conditions under which students feel adequately supported to undertake novel forms of assessment.