Interdisciplinary Assessment in Higher Education: Humanising and Student-Devised Assessment
Introduction
Why Student-Devised Assessment?
Heather shares that interdisciplinary learning prepares students to enter real world situations where they may need to deal with issues from different perspectives and “experience the unknown.” In relation to interdisciplinary assessment, students are pushing the boundaries for how they usually engage with coursework. Instead of only relying on an essay, exam, or lab report output, students are encouraged to “unlearn” previous forms of assessment. Referring to SDAs, Heather argues that interdisciplinary teaching is the “is a perfect place to...embed these kind of assessments” as it offers a creative space to innovate. In her Forms of Identity Module, students are really excited to explore their own identities, and the SDA is the perfect opportunity for students to “go off of what is of interest to them.”
A humanising approach to teaching and assessment in higher education is one that creates a “more inclusive experience.” Heather shows how “personal learning” and inclusivity are considered key components of the assessment process through using SDA in her Forms of Identity module.
Dr Heather Meyer
Director of Studies, IATL
Principles of Practice
Applying Student-Devised Assessments and a Humanising Approach to HE
Marking Schemes
Heather ensures that the SDA aligns with key areas of academic development needed in a CAT module. SDAs support students in developing “core interdisciplinary skills” such as “critical thinking” and “reflexivity.” A crucial objective of the SDA is to allow students to reflect not only on their own learning, but also on how their project overall “is indeed interdisciplinary.”
Heather also acknowledges that the SDA marking scheme considers how to ensure that students from all disciplinary backgrounds can thrive. So, for example, a student from the science department can showcase their knowledge just as effectively a student from humanities could.
Assessment Literacy: Pre-Assessments
To help guide students through the assessment process, Heather gives students clear guidelines from the beginning of the module. She says that “you can’t spring an assignment like that” onto the students. Rather, students are first introduced to the assessment structure through a “pre-assessment” so that students can “understand the value of it.” Importantly, students are challenged to be reflective of their own learning and own needs when developing their projects.
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
SDAs tie directly to thinking about embedding diversity, equity and inclusion measures into the curriculum as it offers students a means to “work off of whatever conditions they are working with.” Heather goes on to say:
“And so if you have a student. I don't know. Let's say they have dyslexia. They actually would have the chance then to choose the medium through which they articulate their ideas. And that has been a very powerful experience for a lot of students.”
A humanising approach advocates for all students to have “the agency to explore their own interests in the way that they want to and the way that they best identify how they want to learn and how well they learn.” SDAs effectively show how this is possible.
Moving Forward
Overcoming Challenges at the....
University Level
One key challenge more broadly of engaging with interdisciplinarity is that students are immediately siloed into their disciplines upon arrival at university, even during Welcome Week. Heather identifies here that students’ involvement with interdisciplinarity needs to be encouraged from the beginning of their studies. Heather’s reflections encourage us to think about how to advocate for interdisciplinarity by making students aware of resources right from the start of their academic experience at Warwick to,
“push to integrate...the culture of interdisciplinarity.”
Course Level
Heather notes that one potential barrier to implementing humanising approaches are simply the size of lectures. One simple way to humanise in the lecture is with a “flipped classroom.”Link opens in a new window In both her Forms of Identity and Global Connections moduleLink opens in a new window, Heather has students watch the lecture recording beforehand so that they can pause and engage with the material on their own time before coming to class. She also mentions using “interdisciplinary homework groups” where students from different disciplines are given a task to complete before they come to lecture and students talk about it in their groups during the lecture. Through the above pedagogical format, students are asked to reflect with each other on material in an active, rather than passive way.
