Damian Ruth
Posts: 6
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| 30/05/2007 00:27 |
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| Hi David and as usual thanks for some really good thoughts. My question is not a pragmatic one directly related to effectiveness, but relates to trust. The more I trust students the more trustworthy they become. The more trusting an assessment is, the less liklihood of cheating. This is familiar. What I find interesting is the tension between a larger audit culture in HE which assumes a pervasive untrustworthiness, and the everday level of trust that can engender efficient and effective forms of assessment. |
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David Boud
Posts: 5
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| 30/05/2007 01:16 |
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| Damian raises an important and profound issue. The more we assume students are not trustworthy, the less trustworthy they become. This means we spend more and more time dealing with 'cheating' and integrity issues. This turns into a dangerous spiral as we get further and further away from learning and we are pressed into assessing the fact-based parts of the curriculum and the notion of developing judgement (which implies trust and ethics) flies out the window. I was impressed many years ago by the work of John Cowan when he was at Herriot-Watt University when he got his students to make genuine self-assessments and trusted them to do the right thing. Other academics were shocked by this because they did not have the disposition to trust their students. Of course, we need to avoid being naive about what we do, but there is much that we can implement that shows we believe students can be responsible. |
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Steve Draper
Posts: 25
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| 30/05/2007 08:21 |
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Trust.
I think this often also applies at the individual level, not just at the group level.
I have to deal with some of the medical excuses and appeals, and basically most fall into 2 groups: one lot have had terrible things happen and don't report it as strongly as they should and need staff help to get what they deserve out of the system; the other lot are attempting to maximise benefit to themselves regardless of learning, merit, or anything. This makes it tricky for instinctive emotional responses by staff: generalisations about all students, which the previous messages on this board all were, lead in fact to wrong responses by staff that worsen the general situation.
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James Derounian
Posts: 6
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| 30/05/2007 16:48 |
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Steve/colleagues - I agree about the dangers of instinctive emotional reactions but I also believe that we kid ourselves if we think that we (and the students)are not subject to emotional influences within the asessment relationship.....the student who has just received bad news, had a medical condition diagnosed; the staff member who has just argued with their partner etc.
So I think that trust is essential; and it also highlights simple things like double marking to deal with emotional influences.
Regards
James
(University of Gloucestershire UK)
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Judi Homewood
Posts: 1
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| 31/05/2007 00:00 |
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Dear colleagues- I'd like to pick up on something Damien said about the dangers of assuming students are untrustworthy. This year in our introductory psychology course (as part of a strategy to reduce student misconduct in the form of plagiarism) we have explained the idea of academic values and the mutual obligation between academic staff and students as a psychological contract, in which one of the obligations of both parties to the contract is to behave ethically. We have been careful to point out that we believe rates of student misconduct are low at our University, clearly it would be unfortunate if students thought cheating on assessments was the norm as this might alter the chance that they would cheat. Many of our unit outlines, after outlining that documentation must be supplied to support request for extensions of time to complete work, contain a phrase which asks the students to consider who they would feel if they stuggled to complete on time and other students were given an extension on trivial grounds. Of course there will always be students who try to and may actually subvert our processes, but as the first post in this discussion said, it's possible that creating an atmosphere of trust leads to trust. It would be great to hear if anyone has any ideas on promoting trust
regards
Judi
(Macquarie University) |
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Peter Donnan
Posts: 2
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| 31/05/2007 00:09 |
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I found Damian's statement 'The more I trust students the more trustworthy they become' a solid assumption but we should not, as Steve says, 'kid ourselves'. This issues comes up particularly with plagiarmism. Demonstrating clear values of trust and being comitted to demonstrating the values of academic integrity and teaching to it in interactions with students is important.
So the opposite of trust is to proceed directly to point 4 in the sequence below and take enormous delight in catching students out, almost as an end in itself!
James, McInnis and Devlin (2002) recommend a four part strategy to minimise plagiarism:
http://www.cshe.unimelb.edu.au/assessinglearning/03/plagMain.htm
1. Development of policy at every level - institutional, divisional, school level
2. Educating students about conventions of authorship and acknowledgment
3. Designing appropriate assessment to minimise possibilities of plagiarise
4. Installing visible procedures for monitoring and detecting plagiarism
Step 4 is important but if you set up a culture of mistrust and suspicion from the beginning the core educational interactions and values are askew. Peter Donnan (University of Canberra)
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Damian Ruth
Posts: 6
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| 31/05/2007 01:14 |
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Yes I certainly think we have to be careful about being naive.
There is also an element of self trust. Although I have been horribly wrong in my assessment of people in the past, both in their favour and against them, it has been relatively rare. So I ask myself is it worth devoting so much time to catch the relatively few cheats. Like David said, where do we want to direct our energy. Also, catching a cheat once or even twice, does not alter behaviour.
I have sometimes (admittedly only with postgrads) handed out the learning objectives and criteria of assessment and asked students to design their own exam/assessment process. The process rendered having the exam superfluous (although, given the instutitonal culture, we did have it).
But to go back to tension - we have a large context of what JOn Nixon calls the palaver of performativity or Hugh Willmott on managerialism pervading univeristies, and within this context we are trying to carve out niches where we practice the espoused ideal of creating autonomous, self-assessing, critical thinkers. I am interested in how others negotiate this tension - being trusting as an informed professional principle when the institutional systemic trust in my professional capacity/capability seems to be diminishing.
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Andy Sharp
Posts: 11
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| 31/05/2007 01:23 |
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Peter
I agree with the steps you suggest to help combat plagiarism much of which can be achieved through good design. Jude Carol's work on plagiarism provides some very practical suggestions on good design.
I think also that we should also develop through practice the student skills around referencing and citing evidence particularly in the early years.
We run a seminar in advance of the coursework submission where we give a simple template for studetnts to use to prepare for the seminar based on referencing. In addition we use the time in seminar to critique previous student submissions and get students to provide a mark and ask for a justification for their mark. Invariably students make the connection between evidence presentation (referencing) on quality and the subsequent mark.
The idea is that if you can develop awareness and good practice where students recognise the pay-off their academic skills improve and so does the level of trust. |
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Janet Taylor
Posts: 10
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| 31/05/2007 01:32 |
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| I am familiar with Jude Carrol's work and have seen instances where these strategies have been employed effectively. But what about the 'shock' that some academic express when they see us trusting our students (as David Boud indicated)...what strategies has anybody used to reverse the punative approach that is the first reaction of many...especially when pressured by large numbers and high workloads. |
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Damian Ruth
Posts: 6
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| 31/05/2007 08:24 |
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| just another quick thought - perhaps because I have often taught in cultures different to my own I have become very conscious of how intensely culture-bound the concept of evidence is. I am more and more tentative about claiming data as evidence for something. |
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Tony Gardner-Medwin
Posts: 14
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| 31/05/2007 09:17 |
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| Interesting, Damian. Can you give an example of the problems that might arise from culturally different concepts of evidence? |
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