Audio Transcript - Assessment

mp3 | Emma Purnell, University of Wolverhampton (4.23 mins)
Emma talks about e-portfolios and assessment

In terms of assessments with the two different groups, the School of Art and Design e-portfolios were assessed they were 50% of the overall assessment for the module. For the Foundation Degree it was for the formative assessment and they could use the e-portfolio at the end for their summative presentation if they wanted to but it wasn't a compulsory aspect. It turned out that about 10 out of the 20 used e-portfolio to submit their assessment voluntarily because they'd benefitted so much from the process they wanted to show the end result in the same way, so I was pleased with that.

We did have difficulty and many conversations around the assessment of the Art and Design portfolios because originally we were marking them on the criteria in the same way as the paper components would have been. So, if you can imagine, this was a brand new module with a brand new cohort, it was really like a pilot of how this was going to work and if it was going to work or not so we got to midway through the module to see how we would go about assessing it . In the validation documents it was going to be assessed against the criteria as if they'd done the same activities on paper. What we found was the level of engagement with multimedia and different ways of presenting things gave us some issues towards the end that we didn't, we wanted to find a way of including these in the marking rubric so that all this extra effort wouldn't be ignored so we came up with a marking rubric that had a section for creativity and alternative methods for delivery so things like could you exchange an essay for a digital story, could you exchange a presentation for a podcast, that sort of thing. It's by no means perfect and it was still under review last year to try and make this more equitable if you wanted to use more multimedia methods for your evidence but for the year that I was there it was still very much that we marked against the paper criteria even for the e-portfolio.

The students' opinions and perceptions of how it was assessed were varied, in the first semester it was very much 'What am I supposed to do? What exactly do you want? How many words do you want? So for some of them it was a little bit alarming that they could do a bit what they wanted to do and put their own framework on it but how we put it together was that there was writing frameworks for each of the things they had to do so there was scaffolded activities if they didn't want to use other methods, so if they didn't want to use a photo blog to show their experiences they didn't have to and they were quite happy with the assessment the way it worked. What a lot of them told me was that the ability to hyperlink out to other digital repositories they had to show their art was really useful so they didn't have to recreate things in this space so they enjoyed the fact they could make a piece of their reflective writing have more substance to it by pointing out to a different site or by pointing to a different part of their e-portfolio so they were with us on the journey, the majority of them.

My personal opinions about assessment for e-portfolios is that there's a long way to go until we get it right. I think many people don't go down the road of assessing e-portfolios because they don't want to take the risk in case it doesn't work out and somebody complains but my biggest issue is the equity of assessment against things that aren't traditional assessment methods so within an e-portfolio you want to put a digital story in or you want to put a podcast or you want to take advantage of the flexibility of being able to express yourself through multimedia yet assessment criterias don't readily enable you to do this. So I think we have a bigger issue of assessing creativity generally and I think we have to work quite closely with the creative arts subjects to take on board how they assess creativity and just, you know, the framework of assessment methods that we use but parity is a really big thing for e-portfolio assessment I think.