Assessment of Cooperative Education and Work Integrated Learning
Last updated by: Richard Coll on 6 March 2009 - 10:17am
Assessment of any learning is highly problematic. As a co-op educator I find it very frustrating when academics scoff at our attempts to provide rigour when it comes to the assessment of workplace learning. I would argue that they only think their own assessment regimes are rigorous because they are very familiar with them. There is a lot of educational research around on how subjective any assessment is, because by definition it requires us to make judgements about what people have written or presented. Dave Hodges, lately of Unitec NZ, is doing his PhD on the assessment of co-op with a particular focus on the assessment of workplace learning. The challenge is how to come up with a regime that is valid and reliable, and yet not so bureaucratic or administratively cumbersome. He has developed and extensively trialled a portfolio model. One particularly interesting feature of this is the onus the model places on the student to demonstrate what lerning has occurred and to provide good evidence. Dave has presented several papers about this in the annual NZACE and international conferences and we from Waikato have talked a bit about it too (see the web site http://www.nzace.ac.nz/conferences.shtml). But Dave and I both are keen to hear from anyone about the issues and how they have tried to deal with them when it comes to the assessment of workplace learning.
Richard Coll
Waikato University
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Variability in Employer Evalua...
Richard
Bates taxonomy and Brodie & Ir...
I found Dave's paper refenced above very interesting. I am undertaking a literature review on monitoring (formative assessment) of work-integrated learning and found some really interesting literature on assessment. Visit http://psychsoma.co.za/learning_in_vivo/2009/04/assessment-of-workintegrated-learning.html for my summary of a taxonomy by Bates (2003), as well as http://psychsoma.co.za/learning_in_vivo/2009/04/capacitating-workbasedintegrated-learning.html for my summary of Brodie & Irving's triangular WBL pedagogical model. These two articles changed my perspective on work placement objectives, the curriculum thereof, portfolio building and assessment. As Dave puts it, workplace learning is often non-curriculum related and unexpected learning happens in the 'messy' realities of the workplace. My own perspective of work-integrated learning (as reflected in my experience documented http://www.apjce.org/volume_5/volume_5_1_35_44.pdf) has been one of predetermined specific learning outcomes to be accomplished by workplacements. However, recalling my industry-based days of coordinating interns, realities often dictated deviations (to my frustration then) from the nicely planned and structured learning programmes. I think my views are transforming, because of a critical insight:
Bates (2003) asserts that learning is continual; that understanding often occurs some time after the initial experience; that experiences build incrementally—each experience influenced by its own social and cultural context; and that understanding can be transformed or occur as a critical insight. Fundamental to Baxter-Magolda’s concept ‘self-authorship’—for the process of learning about ‘self in the world—is self-reflection, which results in organising thoughts and feelings and to form opinions and decisions.