4. Assessment & Feedback

Assessment is the primary means by which students demonstrate that they have achieved learning goals and, in many cases, the primary message students receive about what they should learn in our subjects. I firmly believe assessments should therefore be designed with our learning goals in mind and with scaffolded, level-appropriate frameworks that guide student learning. Below I provided examples of assessment design from my teaching practice, with alignment to the UOW Assessment and Feedback Principles referenced using the abbreviation AFP.

Scaffolded assessment in the first-year

In Section 1, I described the process by which a team of academics (including me) identified skills gaps in our first-year core curriculum. One of those gaps was “Communicating scientific content to a non-specialist audience.” This skill was already implicitly included in our major learning outcomes and is now included in an identically-worded subject learning outcome: Communicate environmental science perspectives and knowledge effectively to a range of audiences using appropriate technologies and communication skills.

To teach this skill gap, I employed a backward design approach (e.g., Whitehouse, 2014) – first identifying the desired learning gains (communicating science to non-specialists) and from there developing an assessment that would show evidence students had achieved the learning gains. There were a few important considerations that went into designing the assessment. First, it was important that it be scaffolded, giving students an opportunity to try, get feedback, and improve (Kang et al., 2014). Second, because my subject runs in spring, I wanted to make sure that it built on skills taught in the autumn session core subjects (AFP Aligned). After consultation with the first-year team, I learned that the autumn session subjects taught students how to find, read, and critically analyse scientific literature. Rather than re-teaching these skills, my new assessment started from this foundation.

The assessment I developed is a “Wiki Project”, in which the class co-creates a miniature Wikipedia-like resource covering the content of the subject. I chose a wiki format based on research I had done as part of my University Learning & Teaching (ULT) project showing that because wikis organise information based on topical linkages (Parker & Chao, 2007; Sigala, 2007), they help students understand conceptual linkages and the networked nature of knowledge in a subject (Schaffert et al., 2006). I also thought that students’ familiarity with Wikipedia would make it easier for them to understand the basic concepts of non-specialist communication such as avoiding jargon and providing balanced perspectives.

The Wiki Project is a 4-part assessment. First, students choose a topic from a list of over 100 topics that span the content of the subject. This allows students to focus on a topic that matches their interests (AFP Designed for Learning). The students are provided with assessment guidelines, instructional videos that explain why we are creating a wiki and how to use the wiki platform, and a marking rubric (AFP Quality Assured). For Part 1 of the assessment, students are tasked with finding at least two relevant scientific journal articles on their topic and preparing a draft of their page. At this stage, students receive detailed, individual feedback (AFP Engaged Feedback) on their drafts. Marks are awarded for aspects they should already know how to do based on their work in previous subjects (e.g., citing sources, organising their writing), but assessment of new skills (e.g., using a neutral tone and avoiding jargon) is given formative feedback only (AFP Balanced).

While the students are awaiting their feedback, they participate in Part 2: peer review (also a skill gap identified in our skills mapping exercise). Students use the same marking rubric to provide qualitative feedback to two other students (Figure 1). This not only provides further feedback to the student being reviewed, it also helps the reviewer better understand the marking criteria and the quality of their own work, reducing the cognitive load they encounter at the revision stage (Hodges, 2015).

In Part 3, students prepare a final draft of their wiki page. For the final draft, they are given marks (summative feedback) on the new skills for which they previously received only formative feedback (AFP Balanced). They are also explicitly marked on having engaged with both instructor and peer feedback (AFP Engaged Feedback). Finally, in Part 4, students submit a critical reflection on both their engagement with feedback and what they learned from performing the peer reviews (AFP Engaged Feedback).

Feedback suggests this process results in substantive learning gains:

Scaffolded assessment across multiple years

Although I do most of my teaching and curriculum development in the first year, it is important that skills taught in the first year are revisited and built upon throughout students’ time at university (AFP Aligned), and that assessment of these skills requires increasing engagement and effort as students progress through their degrees (AFP Designed for Learning).

I have been most involved in course-level scaffolding of learning around computing skills, for which I have developed new curriculum at the first-year level. I subsequently shared these with colleagues interested in incorporating these skills into their subjects. Most notably, I worked closely with A/Prof Helen McGregor as we contributed to the development of a new third-year subject, EESC331. After reviewing all of my first-year materials to understand what students had learned previously, Helen designed an in-class activity and associated assessment that integrated computing skills but this time with significantly less guidance than provided to the first-year students. This forced students to think about what they already knew and what they needed to learn to successfully complete the task. I followed this up with another assessment that required them to complete a new type of analysis and in the process learn the tools they needed to do so. The first assessment (designed by Helen) was marked only on their reflection about their learning process (not the final product), while the second (designed by me) was marked on their final product, another example of scaffolded student learning.

References

Hodges, L. C. (2015). Teaching undergraduate science: A guide to overcoming obstacles to student learning. Stylus Publishing, LLC.

Kang, H., Thompson, J., & Windschitl, M. (2014). Creating opportunities for students to show what they know: The role of scaffolding in assessment tasks. Science Education, 98(4), 674-704.

Parker, K.R. and Chao, J.T. (2007). Wiki as a Teaching Tool. Interdisciplinary Journal of Knowledge and Learning Objects 3: 56-72.

Schaffert, S., Bischof, D., Buerger, T., Gruber, A., Hilzensauer, W. & Schaffert, S. (2006) .Learning with semantic wikis. Proceedings of the First Workshop on Semantic Wikis – From Wiki To Semantics (SemWiki2006), Budva, Montenegro: June 11-14, 109-123.

Sigala, M. (2007). Integrating Web 2.0 in e-learning environments: a socio-technical approach. International Journal of Knowledge and Learning, 3(6): 628–648.

Whitehouse, M. (2014). Using a backward design approach to embed assessment in teaching. School Science Review, 95(352), 99-104.