CRADLE International Symposium 2023 – Keynote Review
10 November 2023
‘Assessment ‘in-the-wild’? Understanding collaborative learning and the need for authentic assessment’
Reviewed by Anastasiya Umarova
Chaired by Professor Rola Ajjawi, the symposium, ‘Re-orienting authentic assessment for an unknown future‘, seeked to trouble superficial and instrumental practices of authentic assessment, re-orienting it towards the increasingly uncertain future. The symposium was opened on 13 October with a keynote by Crina Damşa, Professor at the Institutt for pedagogikk and Vice Dean, Innovation and digitalisation Faculty of Educational Sciences at the University of Oslo. The title of the presentation was ‘Assessment ‘in-the-wild’? Understanding collaborative learning and the need for authentic assessment’. In this post CRADLE PhD student Anastasiya Umarova reviews Crina’s keynote presentation.
In her talk, Crina was discussing the value and issues of collaborative learning (CL). She pointed out the need to understand the complexities of CL in order to address challenges in its assessment. First, Crina proposed a conceptual framework of CL. Second, she provided some examples to illustrate how she attempted to unpack the complexities of assessment in CL. Finally, Crina reflected on how her research explorations could benefit design for learning and constructive assessment.
Ecological framework
To introduce her conceptual framework, Crina used an ‘ecosystem’ metaphor with learning occurring at multiple levels. Elements from other theories (Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory, Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory) were utilised to better understand the complexities of CL and to develop the proposed framework. The ecological perspective on learning is person-focused (individual cognition intersecting with embodied action and the environment), relation-focused (the collective relations between participants and environment that help meaning-making), community-focused (co-configuration of larger collectives and their environments), integrated perspective (interactive layers).
Crina proposed that when assessing collaboration, paying attention to interactional processes but also the actions that followed those processes are very important. To illustrate this, she provided some examples from her current project called TeamLearn.
Empirical examinations
In the TeamLearn project, they look at teamwork using multimodal analytics in higher education combined with qualitative approach. The goal of the project is to examine how CL problem-solving can be supported through data-driven reflection. They are exploring 3 different contexts: nursing education, legal education, and medical education.
Research design includes the following points: framing units of observation and analysis that can assist assessment decisions; research design-inspired approaches; data-supported practice. An ecological unit of analysis includes individual cognitions, traits, skills, backgrounds, lived experiences, affect, knowledge, objects, tools, language.
Primary data was comprised of verbal and written interactions, objects and artefacts, self-reports on experiences through interviews, surveys. Secondary data consisted of researchers’ field notes and course documents. The analysis was based on 4 analytical categories that cover learner’s actions: epistemic (inter)actions, object-related interactions, regulative actions, and social-relational actions.
Reflections
When reflecting on the work done so far, Crina discussed how research can serve efforts towards designing and conducting authentic assessment of CL. Crina advocates for the use of design-based approaches for impacting practice.
Conclusion
In her presentation, Crina discussed how research on CL can contribute to thinking about assessment. Her argument was to acknowledge the complexities of CL, try to understand them and use research-based knowledge to change how design for learning and for assessment is done. She proposed investigating CL as an ecosystem and looking closely at actions. In the examples, it was shown how data provided an objective and systematic overview of group work in order to support in-depth reflection. In the TeamLearn project, they focus on iteratively changing learning and assessment design and on designing digital tools. The final proposition was that theory can be used to engage in reasoning about collaboration and CL should be viewed as an ecosystem. This can provide a basis for understanding CL as a process consisting of people, actions, resources and their relationships over time, and how it is complex, dynamic and situated.
In the Q&A, Crina emphasised that there are ways of structuring assessment towards both individual and joint contribution. In her project, Crina and the team tries to identify how individual ideas lead to either being dropped or accepted by other group members, and analytics is a good way to track it. Also, student engagement and the necessity of being mindful of students’ perspectives was highlighted.
