This was another set of interesting workshops where we talked about learning outcomes and assessment criteria. There were some intense and productive conversations around the challenges that we come across and how we can support students when a lot of the times the learning outcomes can be too open for interpretation. Whereas, assessment criteria can too ambiguous or complicated without reflecting the learning happening in the class.
I haven’t done a lot of assessing and marking work but feedback exchange is a big part of my teaching. When you’re trying to support your students and give productive and structure feedback, it can be challenging to map them with the outcomes and criteria as well as confusing!
Davies mentions how it needs to be a holistic approach to evaluate student work that goes beyond the standard measures of assessment and allows space intricacy of the creative learning process (Davies, 2012) which we have been embracing more currently.
On of the activities that I enjoyed was the ‘Aphorisms’ where we had to guess and figure out more details about them like in which era each aphorism belong to. In my team we decided to categorise them based on the themes and how well they were related to each other which was a great team building exercise!
We also mapped challenges and opportunities that came across our teaching process and some of the common themes were around engagement and building a community which was encouraging to see a lot of us are dealing with similar challenges and had the opportunity to share practices that have helped.
References
Davies, A. (2012) ‘Learning outcomes and assessment criteria in art and design. What’s the recurring problem?’ Networks (18) Available at: http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/projects/networks/issue-18-july-2012/learning-outcomes-and-assessment-criteria-in-art-and-design.-whats-the-recurring-problem (Accessed: 10 March 2024)