I read the article “Know what I mean? Enhancing student understanding of assessment standards and criteria” (Berry O’donovan and Rust, 2004) before the last workshop. The article discusses assessment transparency and tacit knowledge in education. Some of the aspects resonate with my pedagogic practice in creative computing and artificial intelligence and machine learning (AIML) for media and arts. I’ll describe in this blog.
The article starts by describing the historically changing context in HE, highlighting the need to make assessment standards explicit and meaningful to students (p. 326). It then describes some of the challenges in addressing this need. For instance, the fuzziness and vagueness of written marking briefs. This mirrors the lack of well-defined measures in the context of AIML and creative computing – students in my course (even myself when I was a student three years ago) can struggle to interpret rubrics such as “computational creativity”, “innovation”, “reflection and evaluation”. Students in the course often interpret “evaluation” in a scientific context, which typically means technocentric methods such as the accuracy of an algorithm. However, this is not always desired in a creative computing context, in which evaluation can also mean a reflection of the making process, creative goals, and realisation.
The conceptual framework proposed in the paper becomes clearer in the spectrum illustration in Figure 1 (p. 331), which is very informative since it gives a landscape understanding of what kind of assessing elements can help balance explicit and tacit knowledge transfer. I’m recently co-working on an assessment brief for the unit Digital Systems, in which students work on a mini-project over the term. This illustration gives me very timely tips on incorporating some tacit aspects to the brief – apart from written instructions and marking criteria, I planned to create some examples of work to help students understand what distinguishes an excellent submission from an average one. In addition, adding some peer discussion of work-in-progress during class can also help the evaluation process.
In conclusion, the main takeaway of this paper for me is the understanding of challenges in transparent assessment standards and criteria, as well as the implementation of the “carefully considered combination of elements from along the spectrum” in my future pedagogic practice.
Reference
- Berry O’donovan, M.P., Rust, C., 2004. Know what I mean? Enhancing student understanding of assessment standards and criteria. Teaching in Higher Education 9, 325–335. https://doi.org/10.1080/1356251042000216642