Contents
Dom Pates (Senior Educational Technologist), Learning Enhancement and Development (LEaD), City, University of London
[Lightning talk 4]
This is a short reflective talk on some experiences of having been assessed in a higher educational environment focusing on assessment approaches, educational outcomes and the external HE environment.
Adams, Ellis and Jones (2017) suggest that articulating insider knowledge of cultural experiences is one of the functions of using autoethnography as a research method. In this lightning talk, the presenter will take an autoethnographic look at four examples of assessments undertaken during personal undergraduate and postgraduate studies – a philosophy exam, a documentary film as a format for dissertation submission, an interactive media project and a group assignment with external stakeholder involvement. Wiggins (1990) proposes that the best tests are enabling and forward-looking for students, and not just reflective of prior teaching. The aforementioned philosophy exam was an inflection point for the presenter towards the case for authentic assessment.
The talk will reflect on the impact that the assessments had on the presenter’s own learning and professional development, as well as some possible pedagogical implications for teaching with authentic assessments. This session will cover areas such as encouraging learner agency through the use of authentic assessments, the impact that certain assessment approaches can have on learner motivation, the challenges to teachers of marking an assignment produced outside the marker’s domain of experience, and considerations for setting complex, multi-dimensional assessments.
Attendees will hopefully leave with a sense of some of the challenges an educator can face in setting authentic assessments and will be able to consider different strategies that they might use for mitigating some of those challenges.
References
Adams, T. E., Ellis, C., & Jones, S. H. (2017). Autoethnography. In Matthes, J. (ed) The International Encyclopedia of Communication Research Methods, 1-11. Wiley.
Wiggins, G., (1990) The Case for Authentic Assessment, Practical Assessment, Research, and Evaluation 2(1): 2. doi: https://doi.org/10.7275/ffb1-mm19
