Blog: Giving Students a Voice and Audience in Their Assessment
The following is a brief outline of a presentation by Mitch Parsell at the University Learning and Teaching Forum (2008) on Assessment. For further information contact Mitch: mparsell@scmp.mq.edu.au
The Blog
This blog was created by two external students in my second year course Body and Mind in 2007. This unit focuses on the relationship between the mind and the body. The second half of the unit is devoted to contemporary models of the mind such as classical AI and connectionism. The student blog brings together resources on these two approaches to modelling human mental life.
Assessment
The blog wasn’t assessed as such. Assessment in the unit included a small component for class presentation and leading class discussion (20%). For external students, discussion was conducted online via a discussion-board. The assessment was broken into two parts:
- Initial presentation used to provoke discussion; and,
- Leadership of discussion.
Part 1 was deliberately left open to allow students ownership of the task. A majority of students posted an initial summary and critique of readings. In the present case the blog replaced this opening summary.
Advantages
Ownership
By leaving the task open you give the students permission to be innovative. This gives them ownership of their assessment. Allowing student to own their assessment is a wonderful way of increasing their engagement with the assessment task and the unit content.
Increased Audience
By using an open blog, the audience for the assessment task is dramatically increased. The audience is not just the lecturer; nor is it merely the other students in the course. Potentially, the audience is everyone online. By increasing the audience to which the students are responsible, you increase the internal motivation to produce a quality artefact and thereby significantly increase their engagement with the assessment task.
Artefact Creation
By giving the students permission to create their own learning artefact you produce an authentic learning situation. Further, the artefact becomes a study aid not just for the students who create it or even the other students in the course, but potentially anyone interested in the topic. In the future I would like to extend this benefit by carrying the one blog over different offerings of the one subject.
Identifying Individual Contribution
Students can be resistant to group work. The reason seems to be the feeling that individual contributions will not be recognised. Using a blog overcomes this as the blog server keeps a record of who does what.
Technical benefits
The blog platform has other technical advantages: it provides a 24/7 platform for interaction. Note that the students who created this blog had never met. Also neither had ever created a blog and they are not your typical web-savvy modern student (one was a mature aged student with very little technical experience).