Case Story: Composing the examination

Summary	In a 10-week US college course combining technical and values issues, a central activity was jointly composing the final examination
Group / workshop	Making stuff together	Status	seed
Project details...

Situation

What was the setting in which this case study occurred?

The college, Evergreen State College, runs highly interdisciplinary 10 to 30 week courses in which the instructor(s) have very great freedom to choose activities and tasks. Students in turn have very considerable freedom to choose from any of the courses available at a given time. Students span a large range in class, aspiration, previous academic performance, and age. Courses are typically full time for both instructor(s) and students. Enrollment is 25 students per faculty member for all courses. Evaluation is narrative: a 300-400 word statement by the instructor about each individual's strengths (or otherwise) in the various modes or components of the course.

(Truth in packaging for the July 7 workshop: the course in question used Moodle in various important ways, but the case situation was largely conducted in Web -1.0, i.e. pen, paper, and face to face. The case seems relevant because of its community participation and user creation aspects, and because its interactions seem amenable to Web 2.0 settings.)

Task

What was the problem to be solved, or the intended effect?

The basic teaching/learning question was what demonstration of achievement was appropriate to this group of very mixed backgrounds, goals, temperaments, and talents. The intention was to find students' best work, regardless of mode, and to move students from the passive performer role to that of active formulator and initiator.

Actions

What was done to fulfil the task?

Early: declaration that valuing was a discussion topic for the term, both for the content of the course (the science of sustainable building) and its process (what kinds of learning represent what kinds of progress in working with the content); group listing of adjectives about different kinds of good work.

Middle: weekly assignment of composing a potential exam question; readings and discussion of value issues in sustainability (with the question of good/bad work on sustainability explicitly linked to the question of good/bad work by students).

Late: group discussion of preferred format for exam; instructor choice of format; group discussion of exam results

Results

What happened? Was is a success? What contributed to the outcomes?

The exercise of the group generating a full variety of terms describing good work was easy, eye-opening, and empowering.

Proposed exam questions did not get shared widely during the term; though some weekly time went to discussing them, it was typically brief and not well placed for reflection.

The eventual exam was not directly made from the questions proposed by students, but was a single multi-part, open-ended question posed by the instructor. Each part allowed qualitative or quantitative answers, and students could choose which parts to emphasize and how far to take their answers. The instructor proposed this general format to the group as part of late-term discussions of exam format, and got their approval. The college's system of narrative evaluation allowed the resulting pattern of demonstrated strengths to be described individually. Group debriefling of the exam (discussion of answers, descriptions of the experience) sustained the sense of formative participation by students. Student post-hoc evaluations of the exam process generally approved the eventual form, though for varying reasons. The group debriefing was also highly approved.

Math formulas, diagrams and sketches were important to asking and answering the eventual questions, and would have been difficult to manage using software I am aware of.

Lessons Learned

What did you learn from the experience?

It was important to build an implicit social contract in which student voices were not only clearly heard, but were clearly influential, and in which the instructor clearly maintained final authority. This was the path to reconciling the students' quite disparate needs and wishes for involvement and validation. (This lesson points toward some kind of pattern, I think.)

Web-based sharing of proposed exam questions would have allowed much easier sharing and better chance for reflection on what the various questions are good for.

For Web-based group work involving formulas, diagrams, and sketches, I need better tools.

I felt confirmed in the notion that the right evaluative question in education is not, How good a student is this person? but instead, What kinds of good work is this person doing?

Licensing

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.