PS1 R2 ‘Co-created Assessment’ as a tool for enhancing student connectedness

Title

‘Co-created Assessment’ as a tool for enhancing student connectedness

Author(s)

Bronwyn Eager, Entrepreneurship & Innovation, CoBE

Subtheme

Connectedness

Presentation Type

Showcase Presentation

Room

Room 2

Time

11.10-11.30

Abstract

While efforts have been made to enhance educational experience through student-centred initiatives e.g. students co-creating rubrics (Fraile, Panadero, & Pardo, 2017) and self-scoring (Panadero & Romero, 2014), prescribing assessment type and description (e.g. a 3000-word essay) remains largely the domain of educators. Students have little autonomy over the artefacts they are required to produce to evidence their acquisition and application of knowledge.

In a second-year undergraduate unit in the Bachelor of Business at The University of Tasmania, an in-class activity was trialled with the aim of enhancing student engagement through asking students to design their own assessments.

Co-created assessment was conducted based on several assumptions. Firstly, anecdotally, students may approach university subjects with the primary goal of completing assessments rather than knowledge acquisition. Secondly, complaints about assessment likely arise from a students’ perceptions that assessments are not relevant to future work (Kivunja, 2015). Thirdly, assessment should contribute to developing work-ready skills for application beyond university (Ruge & McCormack, 2017).

The activity began with a discussion-led classroom-based enquiry into student perceptions of assessment. As a class, assessment was considered in ‘real world’ contexts (i.e., how entrepreneurs produce artefacts as evidence of their success), unpacking students’ past experience and preference for assessment type, and finally, collaboratively building new assessment tasks.

The initiative resulted in three co-created assessments. These differed from the assessments in previous offerings of the unit such that they focused heavily on screen-based materials and multi-media production. Further work is needed to determine the impact of the initiative on student experience and knowledge acquisition.

References

Fraile, J., Panadero, E., & Pardo, R. (2017). Co-creating rubrics: The effects on self-regulated learning, self-efficacy and performance of establishing assessment criteria with students. Studies in Educational Evaluation, 53(1), 69-76.

Kivunja, C. (2015). Teaching students to learn and to work well with 21st century skills: Unpacking the career and life skills domain of the new learning paradigm. International Journal of Higher Education, 4(1), 1-11.

Panadero, E., & Romero, M. (2014). To rubric or not to rubric? The effects of self-assessment on self-regulation, performance and self-efficacy. Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 21(2), 133-148.

Ruge, G., & McCormack, C. (2017). Building and construction students’ skills development for employability-reframing assessment for learning in discipline-specific context. Architectural Engineering and Design Management, 13(5), 365-383.