Enhancing Teaching and Learning in Group Projects through Poster Assessment
المؤلف:
Pauline Cho
المصدر:
Enhancing Teaching and Learning through Assessment
الجزء والصفحة:
P156-C15
2025-06-28
559
Enhancing Teaching and Learning in Group Projects through Poster Assessment
In our BSc (Honors) in Optometry program, the subject 'Project' is a 6-credit subject commencing in Year 3 and finishing in Year 4 (final year). Three students form a group, and each group is supervised by a supervisor. The assessment of this subject consisted of two components, one in each year - a literature review (Year 3) (30%) and a final report (Year 4) (70%). The former was marked by the supervisor, and the latter was marked by two staff (the supervisor and another staff). For each component, each student was required to submit a draft to allow his/her supervisor to give feedback to help the student to improve the final product. However, this assessment model gave rise to two main concerns - different supervisors providing different levels of assistance to their students, and fairness in assessing the students as no single report was assessed by the same two staff. This mode of assessment also required a lot of input from the supervisors and did not encourage student-centred learning. Some staff were also concerned that they were in fact marking their own, rather than students' work. The first concern is beyond my (subject co-ordinator) control, but the second concern was conceived to be addressable, in part, by introducing an additional element of assessment, Poster Assessment, where all posters can be marked by the same person or persons, and the same level of assistance can be offered to each and every student.
Why another element of assessment? It has been suggested that the 'most powerful criticism' against traditional assessment approaches is probably that these approaches were often too dependent on a limited set of abilities (Brown et al., 1995). As teachers, we need to remember that each type of assessment will discriminate against some groups of students in some way. Hence, as suggested by Brown and co-workers, if assessment is to play an important role in the learning experience of students, it would be useful to use a variety of assessment types and formats, to introduce variety to students' learning experiences. Project reports, including Literature Review reports, are traditional assessment tools well accepted by most educators, many of whom also preferred the status quo (either because they do not see the need for change, or to be blunt), changes are equated with more work. To be fair, it may well be that some do not see why/how any change is going to make a difference, and, unfortunately, the increasing pressure for academic staff to produce more research just does not motivate academics to put in more time and effort on teaching. In this particular study, it was agreed that the additional element of assessment would be conducted by the subject coordinator (me) and need not involve any other staff, but nevertheless, they were invited to participate if they wished to.
Posters are commonly used to present information, particularly in conferences, and are also increasingly being used as an educational tool (Sorensen and Boland, 1991; Pelletier, 1993; Wharrad et al., 1995; Moneyham et al., 1996; Moule et al., 1998). Posters can be an alternative to assessment and written assignments (Akister et al., 2000) as well as being a teaching resource (Pelletier, 1993). Also, with poster assessment, it is relatively easy to incorporate self- and peer-assessment.
The purposes are to describe the implementation of Poster assessment, and to present the results of feedback from students to determine, from students' perspective:
1. if the additional assessment component, poster assessment, is useful to facilitate and enhance learning
2.if self-assessment and peer-assessment can complement each other to further enhance student learning
To enhance students' acceptance of and confidence in this poster exercise, and to increase the fairness of this assessment, particular attention (1.1 - 1.7) was paid to the implementation of the exercise.
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