Outcomes
Future Directions
- Greater use in formative assessment
- Greater use in other educational contexts outside higher education (e.g. secondary, professional)
- Include enhancements from research (e.g. normalisation adjustment)
- Use by students for summative assessment of group and individual task (rather than simply process)
- Use in product evaluation
- Use in real work and simulated business contexts to enhance teamwork
Society
- Promoting collaboration is unlikely without completing the feedback loop
- SPARK is one tool for supporting self and peer assessment, especially with large classes, that enables the feedback loop to be closed
- Generic kit/template easily adapted to any group assessment context
- Guidelines for good practice developed including requirements for success
Department
- Failure possible if poorly communicated or supported
- Mainstream academics reluctant unless robust
- Top level support aids development and completion
Staff
- Improves approaches to teaching & learning
- Increased dialogue about and engagement with pedagogical issues
- Positive effect on curriculum development
- Requiring academics to allocate assessment criteria to different attribute categories had strong potential to influence curriculum development.
- Academics report being challenged to reflect on the design of their assessment tasks to produce assessments that actually develop and demonstrate desired attributes.
- Challenged to design assessment tasks that have components that contributed to the attribute categories relevant for their subject.
- Design assessment tasks to more thoroughly test a student’s application or ability to combine and apply requisite knowledge rather than just testing this knowledge itself.
- Allows innovative assessment tasks to be implemented even in large classes without undue academic burden
- Careful choice of assessment criteria allows virtually any discipline and / or generic attributes to be assessed and their development promoted.
- Improved attitudes
- Satisfaction that students assessment promotes teamwork development
- Greater comfort in confidentiality of process
- Greater comfort in accuracy of adjustments since no double entry of data
- Attitudinal challenges
- Technical hiccups concern students especially if assessment related
- Different disciplinary contexts have different tacit assumptions affecting implementation
- Improved productivity
- Time saved in data collection, collation and calculation
- Reduced errors in application of self & peer assessment
- Optimal if staff & students already online, if focus on developing collaboration not just reducing free-riders and if well-communicated, supportive technical environment
- Ability to re-use and apply in any context
- Improved approaches to teaching& learning
- Increased dialogue about pedagogical issues
- Increased integration with academic developers
Students
- Promotes the development of generic attributes including reflection, critical evaluation, ability to give feedback, interpersonal and teamwork skills
- Allows fairer assessment of group work activities
- Promotes collaboration , peer learning and develops judgement
- Aligning assessment categories to competencies required for Professional Accreditation adds value
- Attribute tracking increases student engagement
- Students can use results collected in their e-portfolios to demonstrate their competence to prospective employers, especially in regard to generic attributes of which development is rarely if ever assessed.
- Multiple layers (Kirkpatrick 1994) includes reactions, learning, behaviour/skills, organisation
- Improved attitudes and satisfaction
- sense of fairness restored
- complaints of 'unfair' reduced
- greater ownership in assessment
- deeper engagement
- no effect necessary if already a team player
- Improved learning
- peer learning opportunities enhanced
- awareness of key components of groupwork
- reflective learning promoted
- Improved capabilities and improvements needed
- team collaboration
- interpersonal skills
- reflection attributes
- Extract from Freeman & McKenzie (2002)