Student publishing as an assessment tool for assignments and research papers
Ed.: I’m pleased to welcome our next guest blogger, Professor Jos van Helvoort. Professor van Helvoort is a senior lecturer in Library & Information Studies at The Hague University. Professor van Helvoort has previously conducted research on benefits of open access for students in higher education (see also this video).
Opinions are solely those of the author.
Higher education in the Netherlands (and in particular the education at universities for applied science) has oriented in recent years extremely on competence based education. In this educational system students not only learn from the instruction by a teacher or professor but also by exploring a problem or a theme in its professional environment. The didactics are, in other words, based on “learning by doing”. While working on the assignment students are of course coached by a ‘tutor’ and can ask an expert for help, but they obtain a lot of the knowledge and understanding while working on the task themselves. The tasks they work on are based on real life professional situations and sometimes are indeed real life projects. Examination of learning outcomes in competence based education is mostly done by evaluating the student’s performance while working on the task, and so it is often referred to as “alternative” or “authentic assessment”.
As a teacher in Library & Information Studies I often give my students assignments to investigate a business case or to construct information management instruments. Usually, one of their products is a research paper. More and more, students publish these papers on the Internet, in best cases via a document sharing platform like Scribd. Those “YouTubes for documents” offer comment functions and are for that reason very popular. However, from my point of view as a teacher, those platforms miss the use of judgment of the documents in advance. Happily we now can use Open Access resources for self archiving (like E-LIS or CoRR) that are moderated and for more than one reason are extremely sufficient for an authentic means of assessment:
- Quality of the report or paper submitted is measured by the professional environment (a moderator or peer researchers)
- Students have to reflect about the metadata that they are going to add to their paper. This means that they have to apply their knowledge about indexing and subject analysis
- Student’s work is not done for school or university but for the student’s own development.
As has been argued for many years (see for instance Carrie Denman, 1995) the authentic task of publishing motivates students extremely. So why should I not use the publishing act in a peer reviewed journal or a moderated repository as an assessment tool for my students?
2 comments
Hi Jos,
I completely agree that homework assignments can serve more purposes than just earning the students a grade, and that the students can benefit from acting in the real world even during assignment work.
Thinking further along those lines, wouldn’t it be worthwhile to extend this approach such that students are assigned Wikipedia articles (or similar free online resources, e.g. Citizendium) to start, to improve or to translate? It is probably fair to assume that most of the homework assignments at the university level can be easily be transformed into Wikipedia articles that are at least starter class on the quality scale, which means that others can build open such contents to improve the encyclopedia alltogether.
By providing a public forum that the students often use themselves for reference, their motivation to write about a certain topic will perhaps be higher than when they know they just write it for that one person who is going to grade it. Besides, students wouldn’t have to do the same homework as their last year counterparts, which leaves the teachers with more work perhaps but the students probably with more things learned.
Of course, problems may arise using such a scheme (e.g. with initially poor performers) but at least on average, the student and the world would profit from the assignments much more than they do in current settings.
Citizendium has recently launched what they call the “Eduzendium” Initiative (http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Citizendium_Press_Releases/Jan242008), and I would be glad to read about other experiences with this kind of wiki-style classroom education.
@ Daniel,
Thanks for your compliments. I didn’t know about Eduzendium, so also thanks for that tip.
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