University teachers' design of digital examination – representations and perceptions

The aim of this on-going practice-based study is partly to explore university teachers' design of digital examinations at five faculties in higher education, and partly to explore university teachers' perspectives on and perceived experiences of varied examination forms, question constructions, assessment and rating practices. This study is framed by theories of disciplinary literacies and assessment (Gee, 1991; Krathwohl, 2002) and by social semiotic multimodal perspective on meaning making (Kress, 2010; Björklund Boistrup & Selander, 2022). The method is qualitative and data is narrowed into two sub-studies; the first sub-study regards digital examinations such as constructions of closed-book exams, project work (open-book and open-web) as well as adaptive tests or other AI-related assignments. This sub-study enables to elucidate how and with what variety of assessment tasks are multimodally designed in courses within and between different educational programs and between faculties. The research questions concern what types of knowledge and cognitive processes are demanded and what potentials (affordances) for students' meaning-making are realised in the design of digital examinations. Data in the first sub-study comprise multimodal texts, which will be derived from various digital examinations. These texts will be analysed multimodally based on the notions of design, affordance and knowledge representation (Björklund Boistrup & Selander, 2022). Knowledge taxonomies such as Krathwohl, 2002 will be used to draw attention to potentials for students to represent different aspects of knowledge. In the second sub-study, interviews with university teachers are conducted. The data collection takes place at two universities in Sweden at five faculties: law, social sciences, natural sciences, humanistic and medical faculties. The results of assessment tasks form the basis for interview analysis, by allowing teachers to reflect upon their own digital examinations, e