Inspiration
How can we transform the design and delivery of our assessment and learning activities to ensure that our students are not only working harder on their feedback than the marker, but are taking conscious, critical, some might say, courageous action to feed it forward and improve their future performance? How do we create opportunities for students to interact with feedback?
– Miles, Wilson & Parry (2018)
After our 2017 FoHS workshop on Feedback and Feedforward, LING219 unit convenor, Nick Wilson (Department of Linguistics), reconsidered his approach to a traditional live in-class presentation in line with the assessment for learning movement:
Transformation
There were three (3) goals in mind:
- To better facilitate the co-creation of knowledge and negotiation of communicating ideas amongst groups of students
- To expand student assessment literacy and empower student self-regulation using dialogic, collectivist, multi-sourced and developmental feedback methods
- To create a deeply engaging, creative and challenging interactive learning opportunity to develop personal epistemologies
Contributing Student Pedagogy
A pedagogy requires students to produce artefacts for the purpose of contributing to other students’ learning and encourages students to value these peer contributions.
– Hamer et al., 2008
The new assessment strategy included:
(i) a co-created rubric activity between teachers and students
(ii) assigned groups collaborating to develop short reusable learning objects (RLOs – videos)
(iii) the group submission, the application of peer review using a peer marking tool (Peergrade)
(iv) the submission of an individual reflection on both, individual contribution to the group task, and a response by each student (i.e. agreement or rebuttal) to the peer feedback
(v) review (i.e. agreement or rebuttal) by other group members of each individual evaluation
(vi) the release of final marks
Impact
(a) Co-created rubric
“I think what I’d really like to see is the cocreating of the rubric in other places [units and programs], because I feel in that way I engaged with what the project was and really understood what needed to be done and why. ” – LING219 student
Similar to Fraile et al. (2017) findings, student feedback demonstrated that self-regulated learning strategies may be activated by student co-creation of the rubric. By positioning this activity at the commencement of the assessment task it allowed students to strategically use their decoded criteria to monitor and evaluate themselves and their group from start to finish:
(b) Negotiated co-created meaning and knowledge
“There was some information I didn’t pick up in the journal article I read from but my group members managed to pick up something I did not initially see.” – LING219 student
Groups consistently reported signs of high cognitive level thinking, interaction and exchange and evidence of negotiated co-construction of meaning and knowledge akin to the activity King (2002) demonstrated is possible with peer learning approaches with particular tasks:
(c) Develop personal epistemologies
“We basically came into class with some ideas about what we thought the rubric or the marking should be like for the assessment, and then we shared those with the class, and then put up our group’s ideas online, then the convenors of the unit decided what were the most common or the most applicable kind of responses, and then that was what created the rubric .” – LING219 student
We also observed that the epistemic authority of the teacher (and thus ‘authority dependent’-inclined students) appeared to be diluted through the co-create the rubric activity, and led to more nuanced meaning-making in the group-produced RLOs (reuseable learning objects – videos):
Unlike findings of other studies (Panadero & Romero, 2014) however, and perhaps due to the co-create the rubric activity being paired with peer assessment, our students did not report stress and avoidance self-regulation problems.
Watch our Beyond Paper submission for the 2017 Social Learning Conference to learn more:
Further Reading
Fraile, J. (2017). Co-creating rubrics: The effects on self-regulated learning, self-efficacy and performance of establishing assessment criteria with students. Studies in Educational Evaluation 54: 69-76 via MQ Library
Hamer, J., Purchase, H.C., Luxton-Reilly, A., & Sheard, J.(2010). Tools for Contributing Student Learning. In: Proceedings of ITiCSE 2010, the 15th Annual Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education , June 26– 30, 2010, Bilkent, Ankara, Turkey.
Miles, B., Wilson, N. & Parry, M. (2018). Multimodal assessment, individual and peer review, and deeper learning: experiments in human sciences – forthcoming.
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 via MQ Library
Hi Beverley,
This is great. Any idea when you will finish the paper based on this? Would be great to include this in the group work planning we are working on.