Today we have a guest post from Louis Bujnoch and Luke Armstrong, both from University of Glasgow. As attentive readers know, I (Cathy) love a guided marking exercise and work with students on assessment criteria and ‘what makes work good’, so I thought this was great! Enjoy!
Essays are boring and we want more exciting, alternative formats of assessment – this is a common refrain from student feedback on assessments in politics and international relations at our institution. Where alternative assessment formats – briefing notes, blog posts, podcasts etc. – are being employed, however, students often find that they are unfamiliar with these formats. This leaves course convenors and instructors with the problem of how to introduce innovative assessments while still keeping instructions clear. This phenomenon presumably is not restricted to students at our institution, a Scottish Russell Group University, which is why we wrote up our attempt to square the circle of finding pedagogically more interesting ways of assessing, while also making sure students understand the expectations of the assessment. The following is a tale of assessment literacy – for both students and course convenors – and learning how to become better at implementing and writing a blog post assessment in a political theory course. Good use of formative assessment is key, whereby formative assessments are constructively aligned and used to unpack the expectations of an assessment which might not be immediately apparent from assessment instructions. Our new course, Contemporary Challenges in Politics, is an attempt to link contemporary political challenges and phenomena with political theorists and theories. Given that a core learning outcome lay in the connection between theory and contemporary events, and as readers of existing political theory blogs such as, Crooked Timber, we thought that setting a blog post as part of the assessment regime was an appropriate way of encouraging students to reflect on political theories in ways that make their practical relevance clear. A common response to theories from students is to say “well, it’s just a theory”. Through the blog post, we hope students can begin to understand how theories are more than this, and how they are important to how we understand the world. Without theory, the study of politics would be unsystematic and without any sense of what should be done in response to its problems.
Of course, using blog posts as assessment in Politics and IR classes is not “radically” innovative anymore. While not a standard format, they are already being used at many institutions in a variety of guises, ranging from single blog entries on a specific topic to iterative assessments where students write multiple blog posts across a semester or even year of study, sometimes even on a live, publicly accessible blog. For the purposes of our course and our assessment regime, we decided to stick to the former and have students write a single blog post of 1,500 words on a topic of their choosing. On the first year of the course, we offered very loose instructions. We asked students to think of a recent issue which illuminated a core concept within political theory, such as justice or freedom. Students were instructed to show how the concept was relevant to the issue, and helped us make better sense of it, while also writing in a style that was accessible for a wide audience. Finally, the students were told that, while they could write in a more “casual” and less academic style which was accessible to a wide audience, the blog post still had to include references.
Students told us that they found these instructions too broad and unclear. While we provided examples of good blog posts on Crooked Timber and other blogs, students weren’t sure what made these posts “good”. For the second year of the course, we expanded on what made for a good blog post. We offered one example of a ‘real life’ blog post, highlighting what was good about it and why. Nevertheless, some students still struggled with the assessment format.
With innovative assessments, or at least less traditional forms of assessment, there is a process of learning for educators as much as students when it comes to understanding the requirements of an assessment. To better understand the form of assessment, while also making the instructions clearer, we have designed a new formative assessment. For the formative assessment, students will be asked to look at a post published on a blog by political theorists. They will then consider how they would assess it in accordance with the marking rubric, which will be the same rubric against which their own work will be marked. Our aim is for students to better understand how to develop their responses to innovative assessment, while understanding our expectations of them. Through evaluating a blog post together with students, we can treat the task of unpacking the hidden expectations of assessment as a joint endeavour. At the point at which the formative assessment is complete, our hope is that our students will better understand why we employ blog posts, and how to write one effectively, while we will hold a clearer understanding of how our students approach less traditional assessments.
Generally, through this formative assessment, we aim to provide students with an understanding of how the assessment works, and what we as educators are looking for in their posts. This is, however, a two-way learning process whereby students better understand the marking process, but we as educators also understand how students approach less traditional forms of assessment. As assessment forms are diversified, with less focus on traditional assessment, we need to better understand how students think about assessments, and their concerns about such forms of assessment. Newer forms of assessment can better equip students with tools suited to a quickly changing job market, particularly in the AI age, by showing students how to apply the theoretical tools of academia to the real world. However, we cannot assume that students immediately understand what is expected of them, or that they see the benefits of non-traditional assessments.
