An update on re-imagining exams: our NCSEHE-funded project
24 November 2020
It’s been three months since I last wrote about the NCSEHE grant for the CRADLE blog, and I thought it was time for a quick update. As Shakespeare said, “The course of true love never did run smooth” (1) – and given my experiences in this project and many others, I rather think that this applies to worthwhile research as well as more conventional readings of “true love”.
Now that I’ve prepared you appropriately, I can declare that we’ve encountered unexpected delays in almost every aspect of the work as compared to my original plan – but so far, it turns out they weren’t necessarily negative.
In our grant proposal and timeline, we had built in a substantial amount of time to get ethics approval sorted: since we want to work with students with disability, this automatically falls under the “higher than low risk” category of ethics application, which necessitates a full review and discussion at a university-level Human Research Ethics Committee meeting. These usually occur once per month, and submissions need to go in several weeks prior so the committee have time to evaluate the application. As soon as I heard our grant application had been successful, I started on the ethics application, and we managed to get it in as we’d planned. While I thought we would get everything approved as per the original schedule, I had failed to take into account the time it takes for the correspondence to get back to us, for us to make any modifications and clarifications, and for the final approval to be sent – and also then for the time it takes to arrange reciprocal acknowledgement at the second institution. So, by the time we were finally right to go, we were already about a month behind.
We were therefore very happy in October to be able to invite students registered with accessibility services at both universities (CQU and Deakin) to participate in an interview and share their experiences of exams and other high-stakes timed assessments. We worked with the Access & Inclusion managers at both institutions to invite relevant students, and expected that we’d just be able to meet our target of 30 students – 15 at each. However, in the initial ~48 hours of invites being sent, we received over 150 expressions of interest! We actually had to send out an email letting everyone know that we didn’t need any more responses – a rare situation in my experience, but something that threw up further delays as we had to work out what to do with this unexpected interest.
It seemed unfair to not involve as many students as possible so, many flurries of emails, great ideas from the team and a meeting later, we implemented a new plan: we could expand our interview target slightly to 40, and put in an ethics amendment for students to be able to contribute a self-prompted written or audio-recorded version of the interview. This wasn’t part of the original, budgeted plan at all, so we’re hoping that between the “discount rate” we’re getting on transcriptions (since CRADLE has been putting through a lot of interviews across projects recently), and scraping together some extra funding through a combination of internal sources/funds from external work, that we’ll be able to cover what we need.
I’m pleased to report at this point (now over a month behind schedule!), we’ve got over half the interviews under our belts, and we’ve just received approval for our amendment to involve more students in this alternative way. It’s such a privilege and honour that so many students have chosen to share their experiences with the team, and I hope we can do justice in representing their stories within the workshops we’ll be running with academics and students to re-imagine exams, and in the eventual NCSEHE report, resources, conference presentations and publications.
Of course, this delay in data collection means our workshop schedule has also been shifted, but we’re confident (so far) that we’ve built in enough time overall to have outcomes reasonably close to the original plan! Unlike in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, we won’t need the intervention of fairies to successfully complete the project: the team (Paige Mahoney, Lois Harris, Jo Dargusch, Mary Dracup, Margaret Bearman and Rola Ajjawi) have been great in responding and adapting to our changing circumstances, and we’re looking forward to getting stuck into data analysis soon.
This work is supported by a NCSEHE 2020 Research Grant.
