Chris Rossdale is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Relations (SPAIS), where they teach the third-year undergraduate module ‘The Politics of Rebellion’. After taking this course with its unusual discussion board assessment, I got in touch to talk to them about their approach to assessments.
Could you tell me more about what your assessment involves?
The discussion board exercise is based on students writing a short reflection piece on the material I provide every week (usually a video lecture, the readings, sometimes additional bits), which they share on an online discussion board, ideally before the seminar. I suggest that it’s around 300 words each time, but give quite a lot of leeway in terms of what format that reflection piece takes – so it could be an academic reflection, a piece of creative writing or a personal reflection.
What I ask, and what is the most important thing, is that it’s the students’ own reflection on the material. It’s not telling me what the readings or the lecture have said, it’s telling me, you know, what’s your response to the material?
I ask students to do that ten times throughout the term. At the end of the term they then pick their best five posts, 1500 words maximum, and they submit that as one of their assessments.
Engaging holistically
And what led you to introduce the portfolio as an alternative assessment, rather than the traditional essay format?
I came to do it because my friend, the excellent feminist academic Katharine Millar at the LSE, did a similar version of this on her gender course, and I taught on that unit. It wasn’t assessed in the same way, but I really liked the approach of basing the assessment on this process of critical reflection on the material. I’m really attracted to this for a few reasons.
One is that I think it’s really easy, too easy, to not stop and reflect. Students have so much to do, we all have so much to do, and you’ve got so much to read. It’s easy to read something and then rush on to the next thing, and I wanted to encourage students to take that bit of time to stop and think about what they’ve read: Did this make sense to you? What do you think about it? What are the problems with it? Pause and reflect.
When you’re just writing one essay on a course, it’s easy to only focus on one week of content. And this assessment encourages and incentivises students to engage throughout the course and stay in touch with the material each week. When we design courses they’re not ten separate topics – they’re interconnected, build on each other, feed each other. This exercise gets students to engage with the course holistically, which I think has a really positive effect.
The other big motivating factor is to allow students to write in a variety of voices. I enjoy this exercise because, you know, students are wonderful, accomplished writers across such a range of modes. Students who are good at writing academic pieces can just write 10 short academic pieces for the exercise and do well with that, but it gives students who are also excellent poets or creative writers an assessment that lets them build on their strengths. It means these ways of thinking and knowing and communicating get taken seriously as intellectual contributions, valid ways of making sense of the world.
Could you briefly explain how you mark the posts and what makes a good portfolio in your eyes?
I send around a document at the start of the year that sets all of this out. What makes a good post is something that shows independent, critical thought about the material rather than just telling me what the material has said. In that respect, it’s what you’d look for in an essay as well, but in shorter, sharper focus. But the important thing is that it comes back to that reflection: are you showing evidence that you’re already thinking and wrestling with the material that we’ve got?
When I give the feedback for this, I do it as audio feedback which is both nice for me in terms of being able to give a more connected and sort of squishy response, but I think also respects the often personal nature of the portfolios.
Critical skills
Are there any specific skills or competencies you’re aiming to develop in students through this assessment?
I think as opposed to developing a particular skill, I’m trying to give students the space to develop the skills that are important to them, and taking those skills seriously as ways of thinking politically. But the skill that is always there is that skill of reflection, that process of stopping and thinking. That kind of interruption is a muscle, a lot of students find that they get better at this as they go through the term – the skill of going ah, what do I make of this thing I just read? That’s a really important critical resource and skill. And it’s one we don’t spend as much time on, given that we’re in universities. We should be exercising that muscle all the time, and this is a way of trying to encourage that.
Do you see a difference in the quality of work that students produce in this assessment compared to what you see otherwise?
Yes, I think the average mark I give for this assessment tends to be higher than the average mark I give for the essay at the end. I think that’s partly because I’m not paying attention to some of the standards around it being perfectly written and correctly cited, but I also think it’s giving people more space to play to their strengths, which might lie elsewhere. There’s also room for students to experiment and for it to go a bit wrong – that’s why it’s really important that I ask students to write ten pieces overall and pick five for the assessment.
What sort of feedback have you received from students regarding the assessment so far?
People do tend to get a bit panicked in the beginning, and I need to do quite a lot of work, reassuring students, reiterating how it works, being really clear because people are nervous. By the end, people tend to really like it, the feedback is good, but you have to go on a bit of a journey with students to get there.
You mentioned earlier that you partly do this so people stay engaged throughout the course. Have you noticed any differences in student engagement or participation with this assessment in place?
One thing I have appreciated is that, in situations where there are students whose attendance isn’t very good for various reasons, I can still see that they’re actually engaged with the course every week because they’re submitting posts. That doesn’t mean I don’t want to try and support them to attend if they’re able, but it’s reassuring for me to know that there are different ways people can signal their engagement.
Learning journey
What do you think are the benefits of this and the challenges for staff designing assessments in this way?
So the thing that I really like about it is that because I ask students to submit them before classes, I can have a look at them before the seminar. It gives me a sense of how people have responded to the material, so I know what we might need to cover in the seminar, and at what level we can jump into the material.
It’s also quite a lot of work for me. Each week I go through all of the submissions on the discussion board on Blackboard and save them all into a document with each student’s name, to check off which student has submitted. With 100 students, that is a lot of work, but without that it would be quite chaotic.
But it’s a real treat to read them. Students are very honest with what they write, and it feels really special to be trusted with that kind of creativity and vulnerability as a student works through these topics. People go on a journey with these courses in a way that is maybe too awkward to express in a seminar, but easier to lean into in a post. One of the reasons I really like teaching in universities is people go on those journeys with the things they’re learning. And helping them in that and designing programmes of teaching that help facilitate that is what I like doing.
Is there anything else you would like to say to or recommend to colleagues based on your experience with this?
We’re moving more and more in the direction of having more varied kinds of assessment. I think this is also interesting to consider now with discussions around AI in universities – I think it would be really hard to do a good version of this assessment using AI, it would fall much flatter.
What’s next for you in this regard, how are you moving forward with this assessment in the future?
To improve it for next year it’s going to be weighted more heavily in the final grade, with the discussion board assessment being worth 50% and the final essay also being 50%, which I’m happy about. And what I am going to do now that it’s worth 50%, is put up some example model posts that people have done in previous years, so that people can see the kind and range of things that you could do.
I might also try and come up with a way that people can submit their posts that involves less technical admin from me. Scraping the posts from the discussion board myself, and then sending the portfolio of ten to students at the end of the course is labour-intensive, but it means that they can’t edit their posts before they submit them in the assessment. That’s really important – it would undermine the integrity of the whole exercise if people felt they could edit their posts before submitting them. It would lose that energy of something done in the moment and penalise those who don’t have that time to go and do it again. And me saving them into a document and then sending students the document and saying “Pick five” feels like it really holds that. But it takes aaages!
Thank you so much for your time today, this was very insightful.
Thank you.
