Reflection for Learning and as an Assessment of Learning
In Spring of 2017 I had the opportunity to teach a first year undergraduate-level molecular biology course. This was my first experience as the primary instructor for a course, and one of my primary goals was to ensure that the class was formatted to include a diverse set of assessments. My aims here were to: 1) spread out the “value” of each assessment, so that learners had multiple opportunities to demonstrate learning, with fewer marks attributed to each assessment; 2) to provide learners with different kinds of opportunities to demonstrate learning with the hope that learners with different academic strengths would have an equal ability to engage with assessments.
I think on the whole that the breadth of assessments was highly successful, and in my end of term assessment of teaching, I found that each assessment was noted by at least one student to be their “favourite” assessment. As a result, when I decided to return to teach this course again, I decided to maintain the number and diversity of assessments.
At it’s core, my classes are built around the importance of making knowledge relevant to learners. I believe strongly that learners learn best when they understand how what they are learning relates to their own lived experience, forming their own reasons for “why they should care”. In thinking about my previous two classes, I felt that what I was missing were opportunities for learners to reflect on their learning to create these types of connections.
As such, I am piloting a “Private Notebook” assessment as part of the class. The “Private Notebook” is part of a learner’s “Professionalism Mark” and essentially constitutes 3% of their overall grade. Learners are not marked on content, only on completion of their notebook. Each day, I provde a question which I ask students to reflect on in their online journal. For example, in our first class discussing the definition of “What is Life” I asked learners: “Does what you learned today change how you think about life? If so, why? If not, why not?”
There were two things that struck me about the learners’ responses. The first, was that most learners wrote more than what I was expecting (100-200 words). I found this suprising, because I assumed that, particularily for the first few reflections, learners would be brief. The second aspect that struck me was that several learners had had a transformative learning experience, indicating that they had never before been confronted with the idea of a definition for life, and they came to realize that creating such a definition is complicated and unlike what they had previously thought of as living. Many learners pointed out that the sequence of events in the class allowed them to come to these conclusions themselves and challenge their prior beliefs. While there were certainly learners who wrote less than 100 words and indicated that their views had not changed in the class, I found that these learners went on to describe what had been added to their prior knowledge.
On the whole, I am surprised and excited by the first few days of journaling. Perhaps my greatest worry is that the benefit of reflecting for the student will be heavily influenced by the quality of the question that I ask. It is my hope that eventually learners will come to reflect naturally and without the need of a prompt. Until then, I look forward to observing their learning through reflection and watching the evolution of their responses throughout the term.