The learning outcomes for this week were:
- Use the Assessment 2 brief to formulate and evaluate initial ideas for an outline and rationale for a new assessment and feedback strategy, appropriate for supporting student learning in your own teaching contexts;
- Critically engage with pedagogical scholarship and your colleagues’ sharing of perspectives about assessment and feedback practice, to identify, refine and develop key elements important to include and address in your design of assessment and feedback.
I have certainly hit LO1 and have a lot of ideas about how to improve the consistent use of the CRJ on the Photography MA. I’ve been through a cycle of excitement, self-doubt, and then a renewed sense of confidence that this is something worth investigating and that I can come up with something that builds upon what already exists yet make changes that are significant enough to be a worthwhile design exercise.
The renewed sense of self-confidence has come mainly through engaging in LO2. Just putting my half-sketched idea out there for others to pick apart has shown that others are interested in how the design might turn out, as well as revealed some sources of reading and research that I may not otherwise have come across.
Of course receiving opinion and advice is only half of the outcome, the other part requires giving back, offering up my own opinion and advice. I find this aspect of the exercise the most difficult. Most people on the course are teaching full-time so it seems almost rude for an amateur like myself to critique their ideas. Once into the process though I find it quite absorbing. With no experience to rely on I have to turn to the books to support my thoughts and arguments and it is in there that I typically find interesting thinking to support my critique but also new reading that supports or influences the thinking around my own design work.
In ‘The Lecturer’s Toolkit, Phil Race takes a moment to consider the impact of not using hard-copy dictionaries.
Pause for thought. Nowadays, most people rarely pickup a hard-copy dictionary, unless learning a language or translating. We can enter a word (even spelled incorrectly) into our laptop, tablet, or phone using Google and quickly get a range of explanations, illustrations and examples – everything we might need. But not quite. What do we miss out?
One thing we can miss is the other words which are close in an alphabetical list to the words or phrase we are looking for. In the days of traditional dictionaries, a not-insignificant amount of learning tended to happen when our eyes strayed beyond our original search. With today’s focused online dictionaries, that is unlikely to occur anymore.
(Race, 2014, p.7)
In a similar vein it is the reading it is often the information that is adjacent to the ‘thing’ I was looking for that turns out to be quite enlightening or useful when trawling through text books looking for supporting text for recommendations I am trying to make for others. It is an interesting reflection that this wouldn’t happen if I was googling for supporting data, I’d only ever find exactly what I was looking for and nothing else.
I generally spend much more time that I plan on responding to other’s posts on the forums because I disappear down research rabbit holes, I enjoy it in an ‘in my element’ type of way (Robinson and Aronica, 2010) and come away from the process feeling engaged and uplifted by the new learning. There is something to be said then for a preference for books over and above an old-fashioned nostalgia.
If I could improve my approach to LO2 at all it would be to try to dedicate even more time to it but this week has been somewhat hectic. I feel I only appear to have done the minimum.
This week has been a real deep dive into the art of assessment, and it really is an art. And something that, done well, requires design. Which is good as I like designing things: Processes, workflows, objects, spaces, and environments. These are all opportunities to design for better social experience and well being. Assessment design is all a part of that.
I’ve learned this, as with the rest of this course, through reading, tutorials and peer discussion. It is helpful to feel that we are all on this voyage of discovery together. As students we cannot read and watch everything about the subject, getting points as to where to go for new insights is incredibly valuable and makes the learning more efficient.
That said the current assignment is going to take more work than maybe I had assumed and I am glad that there is an extra two weeks during the Easter break in which I can get my head around it and carry out more research and thinking. My battered second hand copy of ‘Developing Effective Assessment In Higher Education’ has only just arrived so I am a little behind on my reading.
I think applying the processes of Design Thinking to the design of my assessment strategy is an existing strength that I can lean on for this exercise; as it is a design process like any other. I also have the advantage of having studied on the MA that I am designing an assignment for so can view it from a user’s perspective. It has been interesting to see a similar assessment process being used on the PGCHE so I have two example use cases to refer to in my thinking.
The key action I have in developing my practice in formative and summative assessment is to read more but also to seek out opportunities to see it being done or partake in it.
I have already spoken to the leader of the MA about redeveloping the CRJ as part of my initial design idea but will continue to use the MA as a resource for observing and gaining work experience where possible.
References
Race, P. (2019). The Lecturer’s Toolkit. Routledge, p.7.
Robinson, K. and Aronica, L. (2010). The Element : how finding your passion changes everything. Camberwell, Vic.: Penguin.