Case Story: PED 2

Summary	The PED 2 was a practical workshop aimed at developing cases of formative e-assessment
Group / workshop	Formative e-Assessment	Status	seed
Project details...	JISC-funded project on formative e-assessment, led by the WLE.

Situation

What was the setting in which this case study occurred?

This was a Practical Enquiry Day held on 2 October 2008 at the IoE, as part of the JISC-funded project on formative e-assessment. It included participants from a range of backgrounds (HE, FE, WBL, school education, CPD, researchers and practitioners). This was the second PED, and aimed to include a range of practitioners in collaborative case-building using the project wiki.

Task

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

The project involves scoping current practices involving formative e-assessment, and building ‘cases’ where formative assessment is being supported by the use of a variety of electronic tools.  Most of the day was to be spent building cases of e-assessment in practice and considering the key patterns which emerged. The main task was to collect case studies which are 'authentic' and capture the practitioner perspective. This is to be the basis for identifying key processes in formative assessment in a variety of contexts.

Actions

What was done to fulfil the task?

The day started with feedback from the project team on outcomes from the literature review. This was to raise issues about what exactly constitutes formative e-assessment, and to consider how it fits into wider frameworks of learning and teaching. It was planned that this would inform the thinking throughout the day about the key elements which needed to be included in the cases.

Then we carried out a brief 'sketching task' which asked participants to try to capture an instance from their lives of receiving feedback, and the impact it had. In doing this, we introduced the challenge of trying to capture the essence of something which is very complex, and highlighted the need for focus during the case-building which came next.

Most of the day was used for case-building. To do this, participants worked mostly in groups of 3, with each person assigned a role as: 'storyteller' about a formative assessment practice; note-taker to the project wiki about the case; presenter of the case to the group during the pm session. The point ot this was that the 'case' went through several stages of being articulated before it was shared with the group, so that the 'essence' of the formative assessment aspects would be clarified as part fo that process.  In the pm session, 2 groups presented their cases, and the group discussed the key features whch emerged.  We tried to identify very early-stage patterns in the processes described and give them provisional working titles. This was recorded on a flip-chart.

Results

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

A set of draft cases has been created on the project wiki.

Other cases are being submitted by particpants who could not attend on the day. These are now ready for further thought, by both the participants and the project team, as we move on to identifying the key patterns which they contain and which will inform the next stage of the project. The patterns will form the basis of process models for formative assessment. We started to identify patterns in the 2 cases which were presented. The working titles for these are 'knowledge-checking chat’,‘Setting the teaching and learning agenda’ and ‘Frequent interactions/patters of interactions’

There was a sense of commitment to collaborative enquiry and case-building as an outcome of the day, which was very positive

Lessons Learned

What did you learn from the experience?

There is not enough time in one day to complete case-building to a level of anlaysis which is needed for the project. It is also extremely difficult (as we predicted) to identify the core elements which constitute what is 'formative' about the assessment practices which were shared. The difficulty of this matches the difficulty found in the literature, of being explicit about the precise nature of formative processes. We will be working before the next PED to develop and refine the patterns of formative assessment which emerged, with as much participant input as possible.

We also learned that the practitioners are superbly willing to collaborate in new ways and to be actively involved in the research process.

Licensing

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.