Contextual Background
As a tutor on the CCW Foundation Painting course, we assess students at the end of each term. These assessments are done via an online platform called Workflow. Students use Workflow as a diary like construct to track their progress, write down their thoughts on their work, the artists they have researched and submit images of their work onto this platform. It works as both a diary and a portfolio and is used to assess and grade students’ work.
Evaluation
Tutorials
So as a tutor, my day-to-day role mainly revolves around one-to-one tutorials with students, discussing their work, listening to them consider their current position in their journey and offering any relevant reference points and feedback.
As such, feedback is exchanged in this way on a weekly basis outside of the assessment zone. The feedback exchanged during these tutorials is focused on the students’ thinking and work, in other words, I do not base this feedback on the Assessment Criteria.
I concentrate my teaching on the personal and individual development of the student. I feel this is my ideological position as a teacher. I am more interested in and feel it is far more beneficial to concentrate on the student as a person, a learner and a maker and feel that this is how to get students most engaged with the course, their making and their own internal worlds. I also fully believe that when students are engaged in this way, then they always end up hitting the marking criteria.
For example, one of the marking criteria that we assess is Research and Context. For this I ask students to look at a minimum of three artists per unit. I offer up artists and current exhibitions in each tutorial for them to go away and research. Prior to assessment I email students asking them to ensure that their artist research is not a bibliography or Wikipedia style entry on the artist, I ask them to have discussed how the artist interests them, how they see their own work in relation to the artist and what they would like to borrow from that artists way of working. This increases engagement with the art world around them, makes connections from their work to the outside art world and puts their research into a high marking category.
In my opinion engagement is the key to learning, building worlds and to grading.
Assessments
For assessments, I again try and do this in an informal way where possible. For example, I will often grade students work with them present at the end of assessment in Part 1 and Part 2 of the Foundation course. I feel this gives a transparent understanding of the marking criteria and allows the student to participate “if formative assessment is exclusively in the hands of teachers, then it is difficult to see how students can become empowered and develop the self-regulation skills needed to prepare them for learning outside university and throughout life” 1
End of course grading
For Part 3, which is the final course grading, a different tutor grades my tutees’ work. Before this, I will go through students Workflow submission two or three weeks before the submission deadline. This gives students the chance to see where they are and what they may need to improve if, for example, they are applying to a course that requires a specific grade e.g. the Slade Fine Art BA course.
Moving Forwards
Consideration for changes on my current approach to assessment
I think my own more informal approach works well for students who are engaged on the course, however, for the less engaged or for those struggling with issues such as language barriers, I think a more formal approach to assessment may be beneficial. For these students, I am planning to print out a Checklist which will detail things such as the number of references or artists research required per unit to attain certain grades as I think sometimes this information can get lost over email or verbal communication.
In addition to this, I will keep in mind Seven principles of good feedback practice: facilitating self-regulation as proposed by Nicol David and Debra Macfarlane-Dick.
What are we preparing students for?
As a tutor on a painting course, I am aware that there is no definitive outcome from a painting course, other than becoming an artist and finding a job that probably has little relevance to your art practice but supports it financially, or if you’re lucky a job in academia.
As such my concerns as a tutor on the painting course are for the student as an individual person and fostering their connection to their work. Having said that, I think there is a real gap in how students are prepared for the art world once they graduate – how to show your work, how to seek out collaborators, make funding applications, how to negotiate with galleries. I think this would be a useful workshop to run for students, but I also think it would be more relevant for BA or MA students.
Changes to assessment
One thing I want to see grading and assessment criteria consider is the learning that a student has done on the course. Students do not start off on an even footing as we all come from different backgrounds and contexts. For example, a home student does not have the same number of obstacles to overcome as an overseas student, namely: moving to a new country, often learning a new language, being in a new education system etc. This one some level de-personalises marking, which is good for impartiality, but I feel there should be some kind of allowance or awareness for this.
Perhaps there could be an additional or separate grading matrix that considers this?
At CCW we also have external markers from different courses marking students’ work e.g. a tutor from graphic design marks the work of a painting student and this is used to verify the mark given by the painting student. This is beneficial in terms of creating impartiality, but at some level it negates tacit knowledge which is a vital component for any artist to have. For example, in painting, the medium of paint and how you use paint contains many subtle languages that can be easily missed, this experiential knowledge is important to the act of making and it should not be “‘crushed or stubbed out by an over-emphasis on explicit knowledge”2.
Paint itself is a language and how a student uses paint can convey an awareness of art movement and show their contextual awareness and learning of this. As “human learning is constructed – learners must actively engage in constructing meaning from learning experiences – actively make sense of new knowledge and integrate this knowledge with previously held understandings”3. This cognition of and engagement with the world is an active, social and embodied process which is fundamental to learning.
Whilst it is important to try and create a marking system that eliminates aesthetic preferences or taste, a markers interpretation of the language used in grading matrix’s is always going to be subjective “Staff interpret the meaning of words such as ‘synthesis’ or ‘analysis’ differently from individual to individual”4.
As such, I think a better solution is needed – perhaps internal verification should be done by tutors working together e.g. marking to be done side by side with a tutor working within that specialism and a tutor not working in that specialism. In an ideal scenario “the shared experiences of marking and moderation among staff can support the dissemination of tacit knowledge, resulting in more standardized marking”5.
over time.
Perhaps the future is AI marking?
Teaching ideology
I think the Workshops and this Case Study have brought into focus my own personal views on Assessment and Grading systems. It has made me more aware of my own “politics” or ideological views around what we are doing as teachers in an art college, and I think this really differs from course to course. And it brings into focus the question: what are we preparing our students for?
My focus is on supplying the student with enough stimulus: artists to look at, theorists to read, exhibitions to go and discussion around their work so that they become deeply engaged in their own making. Ideally, I would like to enable students on Foundation to sew the first seeds of their own lifelong journey in discovering and making visible their own personal language.
As Sidney J Harris says “the purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows”6.
References
1. Boud, D. Sustainable assessment: rethinking assessment for the learning society, Studies in Continuing Education, 2000, page 155
2. O’Donovan, Berry, Price, Margaret and Rust, Chris, ‘Know what I mean? Enhancing student understanding of assessment standards and criteria, Teaching in Higher Education, 2004, page 237
3. O’Donovan, Berry, Price, Margaret and Rust, Chris, ‘Know what I mean? Enhancing student understanding of assessment standards and criteria, Teaching in Higher Education, 2004, page 329
4. Baumard, Phillipe, Tacit knowledge in organizations (London, Sage Publications), 1999, page 110
5. O’Donovan, Berry, Price, Margaret and Rust, Chris, ‘Know what I mean? Enhancing student understanding of assessment standards and criteria, Teaching in Higher Education, 2004, page 330
6. https://www.antarcticajournal.com/sydney-j-harris-quote-the-whole-purpose-of-education/
Accessed on 10 March 2024
Bibliography
Baumard, Phillipe, Tacit knowledge in organizations (London, Sage Publications), 1999
Boud, D. Sustainable assessment: rethinking assessment for the learning society, Studies in Continuing Education, 2000
O’Donovan, Berry , Price, Margaret and Rust, Chris, ‘Know what I mean? Enhancing student understanding of assessment standards and criteria, Teaching in Higher Education, 2004
Nicol, David J. and Macfarlane-Dick, Debra, Formative assessment and self-regulated learning: a model and seven principles of good feedback practice’, Studies in Higher Education, 2006