Fostering genuine student engagement with personalised, context-specific assessment tasks
Fostering genuine student engagement with personalised, context-specific assessment tasks
Teaching Context
Educator’s name: Dr Joshua Pocius
Subject name: GEND10002 - Global intersections: Gender, Race, Class
Discipline: Gender Studies
Faculty: Arts
Year level: First year
Class size: 175
Mode of delivery: On-campus
Details of Assessment Redesign
What was the previous assessment design?
Prior to the redesign, the assessments for the subject were:
- Online engagement, throughout semester (50%)
- A research proposal and short annotated bibliography, due Week 7 (20%)
- A research essay, due during the examination period (30%)
What were the main issues with the previous assessment design?
The ‘online engagement’ task was newly added to the subject in 2023. While Joshua was not personally involved in its inclusion, his perception was that it was envisaged to require students to make text-based blog-style contributions to the LMS Discussion Board each week of semester. After the launch of ChatGPT, Joshua felt that this design was particularly vulnerable to AI.
What was the main aim of the assessment redesign?
To change the online engagement assessment task to make it more difficult to plagiarise with AI, without imposing too much difficulty to students in their first semester of university.
How was the assessment redesigned?
While the overall design, timing and weighting of the assessment tasks remained the same as those listed above, Joshua adapted the proposed design of online engagement task so that it included a series of six diverse low-stakes online ‘mini-challenges’ that students could complete across the semester. More details about these six mini-challenges are provided in the table below.
Mini-challenges featured within the ‘online engagement’ assessment task
Title | Description | Weighting | Due date |
|---|---|---|---|
Pre-subject survey | Students provide information about their demographics, background, prior knowledge, personal interest in the subject, and learning goals. | 5% | Week 2 |
Discussion response 1 | Students respond to discussion prompts on the LMS that have been provided in weekly modules that they complete between Weeks 1-5. The prompts relate to weekly required readings. | 10% | Week 5 |
Object-oriented reflection | Students select an object from their immediate environment that they feel carries meaning about who they are and their place in the world. They then use object-based storytelling to meet the task objectives, by either writing a short 300-word discussion board post and attaching a photo of themselves with the object, or creating a 1-2 minute video of themselves with the object. | 10% | Week 7 |
Cultural analysis | Students are asked to write a short discussion board post about a cultural text that is accessible only in their local context (e.g., an artwork being exhibited at one of three galleries at The University of Melbourne). | 10% | Week 9 |
Discussion response 2 | Students respond to discussion prompts on the LMS that have been provided in weekly modules that they complete between Weeks 6-11. The prompts relate to weekly required readings. | 10% | Week 12 |
Post-subject survey | This survey asks students to reconsider the initial reflections, aspirations and learning goals they identified in the pre-subject survey and reflect on their learning across the semester. | 5% | Exam period |
In term of teacher workload, Joshua noted that, ‘given the assignment is worth 50% of the total grade, I would say that the workload is comparable with the workload of the previous assessment design in the subject’. More specifically, the only mini-challenge that was marked during semester was the Object-oriented reflection mini-challenge and students were provided with ‘some general feedback… to guide them through the other tasks. The Online Engagement assessment task as a whole was marked after Week 12, with more holistic feedback provided.’
What are the benefits or impact of the new assessment design? Is there any evidence to support these benefits or impact?
According to Joshua, the overall design of the online engagement task was ‘intended to develop emerging skills that are useful and necessary in a BA’ as well as ‘fostering genuine student cohort connection’. However, as noted earlier, underlying these two core objectives was also a desire to reduce the possibility of AI-related academic misconduct.
While Joshua acknowledged that two of the mini-challenges (Discussion response 1 and Discussion response 2, each worth 10%) ‘are still relatively vulnerable… to interference with AI’, the four other mini-challenges were purposefully designed to reduce these vulnerabilities. For example, the pre- and post-subject surveys ask students to reflect on their personal motivations, goals, aspirations and learning outcomes; information that would presumably be easier for them to write themselves rather than crafting highly specific prompts for an AI tool to answer.
In a similar way, the object-orientated reflection mini-challenge asks students to write or speak about a topic that is personal and specific to them. This task also overcomes potential issues of academic misconduct by asking students to engage with an object in their local environment and creating a video or taking a photo of themselves holding that object, while explaining its significance to them and to theories of gendered migration. Finally, the cultural analysis mini-challenge asks students to ‘engage with physical real experiences in the world’. It does this by asking students to visit an exhibition within one of three galleries at The University of Melbourne and ‘critically respond to one of the pieces in relation to the theoretical content that were covering in that particular week, which was around engagement with urban space and gender’.
At the time of developing this case study (Sem 1, 2023), Joshua was still implementing the first roll-out of the new assessment design. As such, he had limited empirical evidence to evaluate whether the redesign had been successful in its aims. However, he noted that he ‘did pay…closer attention as students were posting’ their object-oriented reflections and cultural analyses on the LMS and felt that ‘it definitely works, and it encourages students to develop critical thinking skills and communication skills in a genuine way’. He also commented that students seemed to be authentically engaging with the mini-challenges, as ‘they all posted themselves with a photo of their object and a story about their grandmother bringing it to them, or whatever it might be, and how that related to global mobility’, and ‘lots of [students] took photos of themselves with the artwork[s], or critically engaged with the experience of the artwork’. Next year, he plans to collect further empirical data to further evaluate the success of the assessment design, as part of a Learning and Teaching Initiative (LTI) grant.
Featured Assessment Strategies
This subject showcases three of the seven practical strategies for improving assessment design and integrity. More details of each of these strategies are provided below.
Design nested or staged assessments
The research proposal and annotated bibliography task (AT2) is designed to be further developed into the final research essay (AT3). Tutors provide detailed feedback on AT2 which students are able to implement as they work on AT3.
Diversify assessment formats
While the majority of tasks in this subject involve written content, students are encouraged to complete the object-oriented reflection mini-challenge as a short 1-2 minute TikTok style video.
Incorporate more authentic, context-specific or personal assignments
Two of the mini-challenges that form part of the online engagement task (AT1) require students to engage with objects their local contexts. The object-oriented reflection mini-challenge asks students to select an object from their immediate environment that they feel carries meaning about who they are and their place in the world. They then use object-based storytelling to meet the task objectives. The cultural analysis task asks students to write a short discussion board post about a cultural text that is accessible only in their local context (e.g., an artwork being exhibited at one of three galleries at The University of Melbourne).
Further Reading
For more information about the design of this subject, please refer to the Course Handbook (here).