{"id":953,"date":"2026-06-28T11:28:46","date_gmt":"2026-06-28T01:28:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.futurecapable.com\/?p=953"},"modified":"2026-06-28T11:33:12","modified_gmt":"2026-06-28T01:33:12","slug":"teqsas-new-assuring-quality-learning-gen-ai-adaptive-capabilities-publication-a-response","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.futurecapable.com\/?p=953","title":{"rendered":"TEQSA\u2019s new \u2018Assuring quality learning & gen AI \u2013 adaptive capabilities\u2019 publication: a response"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I was so excited to read this publication<\/a> on Thursday. It\u2019s rare that I get excited about a new TEQSA publication (with the possible exception of the revised WIL Guidance Note a few years back), but this new one, Assuring quality learning in a gen AI-integrated future: The role of adaptive capabilities<\/em>, is an absolute banger.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As you know, I\u2019ve spent my professional life researching the capabilities people need to adapt and pursue successful and meaningful lives and careers, and how universities can develop those capabilities. From my perspective, this publication gets it right. It provides concrete advice on how universities can tackle what students need to learn and how to evidence it when gen AI is everywhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A bit of history and context<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The previous two publications in TEQSA\u2019s assessment reform series opened the door for the moves made in Assuring quality learning.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first publication in this suite, Assessment reform for the age of artificial intelligence <\/a>(2023), was the compass, containing two guiding principles: (1) that assessment should equip students to engage ethically and critically in a world where gen AI is ubiquitous, and that trustworthy judgements about learning are built from multiple, contextualised approaches across a course. It introduced the idea of designing AI into assessment that reflects real practice, and designing it out only where the task is specifically testing human capability that AI can\u2019t substitute for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Enacting assessment reform in a time of artificial intelligence<\/a> (2025) was the map. It set out three reform pathways institutions can take. These are program-wide reform, unit-level assurance, and a hybrid of the two, each with its own trade-offs in coherence, resourcing and risk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anyone interested in this stuff (and I think everyone in higher education needs to be) should also take a look at the ACSES Framework for AI in Higher Education<\/a> and the Castlereagh Statement<\/a>. Both are great, and both share the same underlying commitment to human-centred, equity-conscious adaptive capability that this new resource now builds on. ACSES brings a strong equity and flourishing lens to the conversation, and Castlereagh\u2019s Principle 3 on process over product and Principle 5 on workload transformation are important enablers for where this new publication has landed. I should mention that the Castlereagh statement is about all educational sectors, not just tertiary, which is wonderful and we need more of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first two publications in the TEQSA Assessment Reform & AI series dealt with principles and structural pathways. This third one Assuring quality learning<\/em> is about a different question that lies underneath all of it, whichever assessment pathway an institution chooses. Which capabilities should assessment be trying to assure, and how do you know that they are developing?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What does the publication say?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The publication names several constructs under the umbrella term \u2018adaptive capabilities\u2019*, including evaluative judgement, critical thinking, ethical reasoning and metacognitive regulation. These capabilities help to ensure that students know when to use AI and what for, to continuously monitor and evaluate progress and outputs, and to course-correct when necessary. The publication argues that these are persistent capabilities that travel across contexts, independent of any particular tool or task (that is, they are generic skills. Please no one say \u2018soft skills\u2019, there\u2019s nothing remotely soft about these).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The publication takes a massive risk of AI use seriously. If a student outsources the monitoring and evaluating of their work to gen AI (‘cognitive offloading’), then the student doesn’t practice metacognitive regulation either. Evaluative judgement and metacognitive regulation are key underpinnings of learning. Skills that the student doesn’t practice erode. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Put another way, if students use gen AI in a non-critical way and this becomes a habit, the quality of their tasks becomes much lower, and also they start forgetting the fundamentals of how to learn and how to perform high quality tasks.<\/strong> Needless to say, this is a significant problem for absolutely everyone. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What’s the solution, you ask? Thankfully one is provided, and it’s an excellent solution. The publication proposes use of what it calls process evidence. Process evidence is the record of how the AI-collaborative task was done: drafts and version history, notes on what was tried and discarded, the back-and-forth with gen AI, and how a piece of feedback was acted on. The assessed item becomes the final output in addition to the ‘process evidence’ of student judgement and evaluation, metacognitive regulation, and ethical reasoning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alignment with empirical employer research<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It turns out these are also the capabilities Australian employers say new graduates need and are missing<\/strong>. Across 203 survey responses from Australian employers in two linked studies this year**, I found AI literacy (the knowledge, skills and understanding required to effectively engage with, interpret, and utilise AI technologies) and the critical thinking to evaluate AI outputs, were the two key entry level role capabilities most commonly called out as being needed by entry level hires (90.6% and 81.2% respectively). Graduates were rated only moderately prepared for either. The employers who said that gen AI capabilities were more important tended to say that graduates were less prepared. When we asked which skills gaps employers had noticed in their most recent hires, their answers pointed beyond basic AI literacy to critical AI judgement<\/strong>: knowing when to trust an output, when to override it, and how to take responsibility for the result. That\u2019s the workplace mirror of the evaluative capabilities Assuring quality learning<\/em> is now calling for universities to assure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At a task level, employers told us they were using gen AI the most for repetitive work, with 85% reporting this pattern, concentrated in routine production and first-pass tasks. As AI was doing more routine work, graduates were spending less time doing it, and more time checking it. As one respondent put it, \u2018students still need to learn how to do the tasks themselves, and now they also need to learn how to supervise a half competent machine to do it. When the AI is good it\u2019s much faster, but it needs to be checked every step of the way<\/strong>.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The skills gap employers described speaks directly to this change in entry-level job responsibilities. One participant summed it up as: \u2018students and graduates have an inability to understand the difference between what the AI can do (repetitive tasks) and what they should do themselves (decision-making, more complex\/abstract thinking, creative tasks).<\/strong>\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Industry has already shown us what these gaps look like in practice. The Assuring quality learning publication has just told us what to assure and how to evidence it. Now it’s up to us all to work out how to implement it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some closing thoughts and questions<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finally, here are some things I\u2019m thinking about after reading Assuring quality learning<\/em>. They aren\u2019t criticisms of the document at all, which says exactly what it needs to say – but this is an incredibly thought-provoking area.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. What are the specific dimensions of capability that we\u2019re looking for in process evidence, and how do they manifest? The publication gives us some clues, but educators out there need to be familiar with the literature on self-regulated learning, metacognitive regulation, evaluative judgement and ethical reasoning as it is evidenced in their disciplinary and task contexts in order to create assessment tasks, learning outcomes, rubrics etc. I feel like a practical toolkit could be really helpful. I\u2019d use it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. Related to 1 but going beyond it – it\u2019s clear that the task of educator professional learning for curriculum and assessment design in the age of AI is epic and ongoing. How do we foster the capabilities that our educators and educational leadership need, like choosing the right assessment reform pathways and enacting them, developing specific assessment literacies, and being AI-literate and fluent themselves? It also strikes me there is a large educator identity shift required here, much bigger than that of students.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3. As we move from automation and checking toward augmentation, we\u2019re going to need to teach and assess continually updating and increasingly sophisticated discipline-specific AI literacies. The capabilities outlined here should be OK. They are \u2018generic\u2019 and are about demonstrating criticality and learning. But the discipline-specific AI skills are moving fast, much faster than we can update curriculum. Do we try to keep pace? If so, how, or do we argue that students will have the foundational capabilities from uni and can then learn the specific skills on the job? Does that argument still hold when so much is changing so fast now? Are the foundations shifting?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Overall, Jason, esteemed colleagues, I am impressed with Assuring quality learning<\/em> and the rest of your collaborative leadership in the space. Australia\u2019s sector-wide principles-based assessment and assurance approaches are world-leading.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(I should probably mention at some point that this is an unsolicited endorsement and they are likely to be surprised, and hopefully happy, or at the very least OK that I posted this).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Footnotes<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

*This is a minor quibble, but I suspect that calling them \u2018adaptive capabilities\u2019 isn\u2019t precise enough for the elegance of this construct. We\u2019re talking here about capabilities that govern a learner\u2019s thinking, learning and task performance. Adaptive capabilities can be anything that is about changing, adjusting, or modifying one\u2019s thinking, identity or behaviour to suit new or changing conditions. The term is already used in different literatures to mean different and broader constructs (which is often the case with academic work, where it\u2019s hard to come up with a new term), e.g. HR and graduate capabilities literature uses \u2018adaptive capabilities\u2019 more or less interchangeably with general adaptability, resilience, and the capacity to handle change. The related term \u2018adaptive expertise\u2019 was originally used by Hatano and Inagaki in 1986, plus a body of literature since then, to distinguish between routine expertise, the efficient execution of known procedures, and adaptive expertise, the capacity to develop new solutions or even new problem-solving methods when faced with novel situations.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

**Bridgstock, R., & Kuek, M. (accepted). Will a robot steal my internship? Generative AI, WIL, and graduate work in Australia: Implications for education. International Journal of Work Integrated Learning.<\/em><\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"reddit\"<\/a>\"pinterest\"<\/a>\"linkedin\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was so excited to read this publication on Thursday. It\u2019s rare that I get excited about a new TEQSA publication (with the possible exception of the revised WIL Guidance Note a few years back), but this new one, Assuring quality learning in a gen AI-integrated future: The role of adaptive capabilities, is an absolute … Read more TEQSA\u2019s new \u2018Assuring quality learning & gen AI \u2013 adaptive capabilities\u2019 publication: a response<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[111,108,110,59,7],"class_list":["post-953","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-change-in-higher-education","tag-ai-in-education","tag-assessment-reform","tag-gen-ai","tag-graduate-employability","tag-higher-education"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.futurecapable.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/953","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.futurecapable.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.futurecapable.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.futurecapable.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.futurecapable.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=953"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.futurecapable.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/953\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":954,"href":"https:\/\/www.futurecapable.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/953\/revisions\/954"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.futurecapable.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=953"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.futurecapable.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=953"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.futurecapable.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=953"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}