Does having a choice in the form of assessment help to promote deep learning amongst students?
Philip Long
Senior Lecturer
Anglia Ruskin University
Introduction:
The focus of this research is an examination of the impact on student learning of a modification I made to the assessment procedures on an MA module at Anglia Ruskin University: namely the decision to allow students to select the form of assessment from a choice of three forms. The module, Assessment in Post Compulsory Education (PCE) is one of two which make up the University’s Postgraduate Certificate (Learning and Teaching in Higher Education), hereinafter the PGCert, which all new members of teaching staff take as part of their probationary year. The research was carried out using a phenomenographic approach through which I explored the respondents’ life worlds and the tensions between learning as a concept and learning as a process. Analysis of interviews revealed the respondents, all women, spoke of learning in ways consistent with surface approaches but acted in ways consistent with a deep approaches. It emerged that the process of choosing the form of assessment, as distinct from having the form of assessment imposed, reinforced the respondents’ approaches to deep learning.
Rationale/background for my research:
I initially decided to change the assessment task to a 7000 word patchwork text as this was a form of assessment of interest to me. It had been developed by Richard Winter when he was a professor at Anglia Ruskin. Winter describes the patchwork text as:
...a variety of small sections, each of which is complete in itself, and that the overall unity of these component sections, although planned in advance, is finalized retrospectively, when they are ‘stitched together’. Thus, a ‘patchwork text’ assignment is one that is gradually assembled during the course of a phase of teaching and consists of a sequence of fairly short pieces of writing, which are designed to be as varied as possible and to cover the educational objectives of the teaching.
(Winter, 2003: 112)
The advantages of adopting a patchwork text which Winter identified were self evident to me. However, I realised there was a risk that in seeking to adopt an innovative form of assessment I might disadvantage those students for whom such an approach would be unfamiliar and excessively challenging. Therefore rather than simply exchanging one single form of assessment for another I offered the students a range of assessment methods from which they could select the one which they felt would allow them to best demonstrate their learning. Thus alongside the patchwork text students could also opt for a group project or a conventional 7000 word essay. I was strongly influenced in my approach by Wenger’s conception of Communities of Practice and his argument that “In order to redirect learning, it may be necessary to offer learners alternative forms of participation...” (Wenger 2006: 215).The briefing provided to the students is included in appendix 1.
Research design
My research instrument was semi–structured interviews with a purposive sample of six students. Three of these have been completed and are included in this paper. My research design was strongly influenced by phenomenography which Micari, Light, Calkins and Streitwieser have described as “...variation in the ways people experience learning in various contexts.” (Micari et al, 2007: 459). There is a clear link between phenomenography as defined by Micari et al and the work of Marton and Säljö (1976). This made a strong case for research that focused on the relationship between the student and the subject being learnt and how the student adopted different approaches to the learning process dependent on his/her perception of the relationship to the subject being studied.
I was interested in how respondents constructed their own concepts of learning as . I also sought to know whether, in the light of their constructs, students found their approaches to learning influenced by the opportunity to select a form of assessment which would provide the closest fit to their own conceptions of learning. The closeness of fit between individual concepts of learning and the assessment process was, I thought, critical, if students were to develop a deep approach to learning (Biggs, 2006). Following each 45 minute, taped interview I made field notes reflecting on my initial impressions of the interview and what I thought the respondents were telling me about their approaches to learning.
Data Analysis and Discussion:
Data were analysed using four a priori themes. These were then used to attach starter codes to individual parts of the data and emergent codes developed. Once the initial trawl of raw data had been completed the first starter codes were tentatively attached to “chunks” of text and I then undertook a more detailed analysis of the data. A number of initial emergent codes presented themselves from the data which I grouped under the initial starter codes.
My three respondents, Anna, Bridget and Carol, were relatively inexperienced teachers, of early years, tax services and midwifery respectively. All three respondents acknowledged high levels of anxiety regarding assessment requirements at the start of the module.
The first extracts deal with how Anna, Bridget and Carol explain their concepts of learning and relate to my first research question. The extent to which the final choice of form of assessment was a product of the respondents’ conception of learning is critical in order to establish links between the opportunity to choose the form of assessment and the development of deeper learning. When asked to define learning respondents said:
Anna: Learning, um, being able to acquire new knowledge but you can then assimilate enough to use yourself. That it’s part of, it’s a part of what you can, your bank of knowledge.
Bridget: Learning is all about something that happens to people every single day, you know, if it’s on-the-job learning, you could be in a client meeting with um, someone who’s a couple of grades more senior than you and they’re talking to the client and they’ll say something, and they’ll suddenly think ‘oh yes, I hadn’t thought about that before! I agree with that actually’ and that will then change the way that they thought about that idea; so they’ve learnt something.
Carol: Learning is, um, well it’s a huge thing isn’t it? It’s, learning something different than your normal outlook – it’s learning something that’s actually going to help you in everyday life, or academic life, or in your practice, that can actually make a difference; because if you can learn but true learning for me, is being able to do something with that learning.
PL: Right, okay, and that links in to what you were saying about…
Carol: It links into I suppose my, speciality but anything that you learn you need to be able to do something with. So, whether I learned something from your research module, you know, I could just sit back and do nothing, but you know, I want to put that into my practice now and do something with it.
Entwistle (1998) has pointed out that any attempt to understand students’ conception of learning which emerges from an interview needs to be seen both in terms of the context of what the respondents had been saying previously, and in terms of their previous learning experiences. Furthermore, Entwistle points out the need to treat what “... we [are] hearing ... not a direct indication of a conception of learning, but how that conception was expressed on that occasion.” (Entwistle, 1998, no page number). Entwistle argues this is a product of the “...cultural legacies of knowledge which form the raw material of the conceptions and understanding...”(Entwistle, 1998, no page number). The implications of Entwistle’s argument suggested to me that what students did may give a greater insight into their conception of learning than what they said whilst McDowell’s (1995) emphasis on the context of learning highlighted the localised nature of the learning context within which the respondents acted.
For Anna, Bridget and Carol part of the context in which they were learning was that they had a choice in the form of assessment. Interestingly the respondents’ discussion of the ways they chose the form of assessment displayed conceptions of learning which seemed to go beyond the above espoused definitions. Thus for Anna, the opportunity to work collaboratively with her peers was a major incentive but formed no part of her earlier definition of learning. For Carol the socially situated learning processes inherent in group work were attractive. And for Bridget the focus was on learning as a process of personal growth.
Anna .. I was invited to join a patchwork group with people I knew I could work with and they said ‘why don’t you come and join our group?’ and I thought ‘yeah alright I’ll join that’, but I wasn’t expecting to enjoy doing it and I did enjoy the patchwork: It wasn’t one that I’d picked at all...
Carol : I chose the group method of assessment because out of any of my academic education through doing um, nursing and midwifery, I’ve never ever ever been offered the opportunity to do a group assessment so I jumped at it because I quite like new experiences um, you know, I quite like the challenge of doing a new, something new um, and I was sick to death of writing essays ...
Bridget: I guess the main reason was probably quite personal, um, because I had not done a BA, I’d never done a further education qualifications and I was testing myself a bit that I could answer every single objective for writing an essay so I had to do all the research, unlike the group work where you could have split it up and not have done some of research at all! I actually wanted to do all of it so I [mobile phone][1] testing myself, I wanted to learn every single part of the [mobile phone] the objectives and questions so I could personally improve!
Beaty, Gibbs and Morgan (2005) identify four orientations to learning: vocational, academic, personal and social and the extracts above indicate all three respondents provided evidence of a personal intrinsic approach to learning. Beaty et al suggest that students adopting a personal intrinsic approach to learning are more inclined to focus on the “...broadening effect of education...” (Beaty et al, 2005: 81 italics in original) an approach which Marton and Säljö (2005) associate with a deep approach to learning. Light and Cox (2004) reproduce the following table based on the work of Marton et al to illustrate what they describe as reproductive conceptions of learning and transformative conceptions of learning:
Conceptions of learning
1. A quantitative increase in knowledge2. Memorizing Reproducing
3. Acquisition of facts and methods etc.
4. The abstraction of meaning
5. An interpretive process aimed at understanding Transforming
6. Developing as a person
(Light and Cox, 2004: 51)
The paradox here is that respondents’ espoused views of learning appear to be conceptually closer to the model of learning defined as reproducing and thereby aligned to a surface approach, whilst what respondents actually did, particularly in terms of their awareness of their personal development, links more to the transformative model of learning aligned to the deep approach to learning. However, the respondents’ action is consistent with the qualitative research carried out by Burnett, Pillay and Dart who argue that their work “...contradicts the view that conceptions of learning are the direct antecedents of approaches to learning.” (Burnett et al, 2003: 61).
In terms of defining how students approach learning Burnett et al point to considerations such as their perceived ability and the extent to which they felt in control of the learning situation. These processes can be seen in the following extracts:
The replies are in response to a question about why they chose the particular form of assessment:
Anna: Well when I looked at the original choices there was no way I was going to do anything other than the essay. I felt comfortable with the essay, I felt in control with it, I thought ‘that’s what I’ll do, I don’t want to get involved in anybody else’s problems’...
Carol: A bit scared really!
PL: Scared?
Carol: …. I was a bit scared really because even my dissertation 10 years ago was 10,000 words so I, for me, I was sort of, you know, I was um, a in a bit of trepidation really.
Bridget: ... um, the only reason I chose not to do the patchwork text was because of more of the creative side about it; writing in the style of a newspaper or something like that because I never ever have to write in a creative style, so I think I would have struggled a bit with that. And with the group work, I suppose if I’m honest I would say that because I ... didn’t easily fit into one of their categories; I wasn’t in the nursing category, or the optometrist category or anything like and I ... would have stuck out like a sore thumb!
Although all the respondents identified concerns about their capacity to successfully achieve the required learning outcomes at the start of the course, by the end of the course their confidence had grown and their perception of the learning process had developed as the extracts below indicate:
Anna: ...I think when I went on the course I was hoping to find, I don’t know, the Golden Path, the definitive answer on ‘this is what you do’ and ‘this is how you do it’, and of course there isn’t; with any assessment. I am a lot more aware of more problems than I had been before: I think that’s very useful. Certainly aware of individual students needs and things more, and I’m much more aware of that in my own teaching now.