TEDI conferences: "Academic Workloads and Assessment"

Robin Fisher
Lecturer-in-Sciences, School of Nursing
Australian Catholic University, McAuley

Abstract:

Assessment drives student learning. Workloads drive assessment. The hypothesis presented here is that with increasing workload demands being placed upon academics, assessment may suffer. The consequences of this may be reduced quality of student learning.

That workloads are increasing is indisputable. In our last Enterprise Bargaining Agreement (ACU), academic staff was committed to 336 hours annually face-to-face teaching, plus 24 hours "work" to be documented. This was designed to make "lazy" staff more accountable. In the current EB round, many Universities are being required to include workload statements in their EB Agreements. The NTEU is very concerned at the upward trend in time demands on academic staff. Our institution is trying to increase its research profile. So, in addition to the increase in teaching loads, staff are also under pressure to increase their research output, their Promotions activities, curriculum review and development activities, and to develop and present continuing education "short courses". "Flexible delivery" looms like a shadow at every office door...

The "soft spot" in an academic's workload/time commitments may well be the time spent devising, preparing and marking assessment items. This is time academics have control over. There is little else over which individual control can be exercised! Of course, we could refuse to attend meetings! We can recycle last year's lecture notes. But lectures are public, often viewed by our peers, and the notes are now posted on the web! There is an incentive here to spend extra time doing the spell check and include the latest figures.

But assessment may be very private. Between lecturer and student. Very little peer-review there! So, who's to know if last year's assessment gets dusted off? (Repeating students probably won't scream.) Randomly-generated multiple-choice questions from the publisher's data base take very little time to prepare, and little time to mark. This may be an increasingly popular choice for those lecturers in charge of large first-year generic subjects.

Reassessing assessment may be an opportunity to reform old practices. Over-assessment may have been a problem; now is the time to reduce. The Internet has rendered some assessment techniques obsolete. It is no longer valid to set "ye olde essay" when copy-and-paste can be done by any first year student.... in fact, by most high school students.

So, every difficulty may be an opportunity in disguise. Peer-assessments, self-assessments, reflective writing, collaborative project development, group work...all may have a valuable place in a new, slimmed-down assessment program. Following are some of the adaptations made by colleagues and myself in an attempt to match assessment needs and "good practice" principles with time available.

The form of assessment that will vanish first (or has already disappeared) is formative assessment. Time spent marking and writing feedback must count! We (School of Nursing - science units)have retained an impure form of formative assessments. Since we have a series of units of similar structure, and the formats of assessment are repeated in each unit, then summative assessment in unit 1 becomes formative for unit 2. We repeat assessments in five semesters of Bioscience within Nursing. A little communication and cooperation between lecturers could make this more common.

We use in-class student seminars as a standard assessment item in each semester of Bioscience within the Nursing course. Topics are set; students sign up; presentations are given over about seven weeks. Since seminars are learning experiences for the students in the class, some "quality control" must be exercised by the lecturer/facilitators. So, student presenters must have some consultation with their facilitators (or the lecturer). While we would not abandon this in-class assessment, we need ways to make the consultation time more efficient (see Table 1).

Examinations have been reintroduced to my repertoire. Many exams can be recycled if the School or University does not have a policy of open access. I do not post last year's exam. I would soon run out of ideas and questions if I did. First-year students get a scenario to guide their study; other year groups have case studies each week to guide weekly study, and these form the basis for all exam questions.

Before	After
Individual student appointments with facilitator Each facilitator had 20 students in a tutorial Some facilitators had 2-3 groups Each student interview may have taken 30 minutes 600 minutes = 10 hours per semester Multiply by number of classes!	Group of students on 2-3 topics meet with lecturer Students talk to each other! Lecturer can advise, share resources, requirements with groups of 6-8 students Time 30-50 minutes/week These weekly meetings can be shared among the team Thus, each facilitator may contribute 1-2 hours per semester

The time constraints are really in the marking. Here, the teamwork and cooperation from my teaching team has been tremendous. With a group sitting in a classroom with scripts, each person marking 1-2 pages of the exam, the exams are marked and moderated within a reasonable day's work. The reliability of marking increases with a team approach. I strongly recommend to anyone coordinating a unit to "be plural". Use this opportunity to take on a junior member of staff as a "co-coordinator". Then, share the marking!

My greatest progress/reform has been made with the help of the Student Services Education Officer. She and I brainstormed on an alternative to the 1500-word essay that had been traditional, but increasingly unsatisfactory. We started with what skills we wanted these first-year students to develop through this assignment, and covered ways to avoid the "over-use" of the written resources I have alluded to earlier. Plagiarism used to take up a lot of my time at the end of a semester....... all of it very unpleasant and unproductive time!

We developed an assignment that requires students to access nursing literature databases, select pertinent articles, summarize the content (200 words/article) and justify the topic as "relevant to nursing" (400 words). A "Progress Report" verifies the appropriateness of the articles selected, and the marking is done on the basis of technical aspects, and understanding of the content. This marking has proven to be much faster and more reliable than marking essays. Marking is distributed across the teaching team by topic rather than by class. Moderation is done by pre-marking for new members of the team and by double marking failing scripts. There are still lots of problems!

The University recently introduced a restructuring of units. This was outside the EB process and was presented to staff as a "fait accompli". This meant that units that had been presented as 1-hour lecture plus 2-hour tutorial would henceforth be presented as 2-hour lecture plus 1-hour tutorial. Table 2 shows how this could alter a lecturer's workload.

Previous structure	New structure
Unit fo 150 students: 6 tutorials Lecture = 1 hour Tutorials = 12 hours Total = 13 hours/week	Unit of 150 students Lecture = 2 hours Tutorials = 6 hours Total = 8 hours

Table 2 Restructured units and increased workload

It is clear that a Lecturer's workload in student contact and marking could almost double under this restructuring. This has put many academics under tremendous pressure to reduce the time spent in assessment. Especially hard-hit are academics who have taken responsibility for large first-year units. It is incumbent upon administration to take into consideration the increase in marking and either create a teaching team, or reduce an academic's teaching hours to compensate or, perhaps, pay for external marking.

Speaking with some academics affected by this restructuring, especially in our School of Education, it is clear that they must reconsider their assessment. One-hour tutorials do not allow for individual in-class presentations. Group presentations in-class are still possible and are being used; however, I have observed some assessment of groups going on after classes have ostensibly finished for the semester. Extra workload!

A throwaway line in passing, as one heavily burdened lecturer trudged to her car with English assignments from the future primary teachers: "How can you teach writing in a lecture?" Workshops? Not timetabled!

A colleague in the School of Nursing has dropped a written assignment in favor of in-class student presentations. This is becoming a more and more popular assessment technique...and creates a "co-learner" environment in the class! It is often partly justified on the basis of developing communication skills. And it does!

One innovative way to reduce the assessment load on both students and academics is to integrate assessment between two units. One assignment, one mark, recorded in both units. We integrate one assessment item (a Learning Journal) in the two science units in semester one. Another teaching team within Nursing has integrated two nursing units for the first semester, sharing topics within lectures and tutorials. This experiment has yet to be evaluated. This semester, we are double-counting Concept Maps constructed in Bioscience from the in-class seminars across into the concurrent Nursing unit. We have yet to get formal feedback from students, but informal comment is that they feel they are getting more value for the work they have put into the Maps.

Another academic, in the School of Education, has reduced a written assignment from "analyze six articles" to "analyze four articles"; a reduction of one third...primarily as a response to decreased time for marking. This same colleague uses in-class group presentations. To date, a written critique of the group process has also been required, 1500 words! This may go! Will her examination change to Multiple Choice?

Already, examinations have so changed in at least one unit. This lecturer uses a randomly-selected, computer-generated M.C. exam from the publisher's database. He makes no bones about it..."it's a Mickey Mouse exam" he says.... but he has not the time to do anything else with the numbers of students enrolled, and his administrative duties.

More recently, another dictum has been received by the workers at the coalface. Post-graduate units must be no more than 24 hours contact per semester. Currently, such units are 36 hours or 30 hours contact. This had the insidious effect of freeing staff to teach in more units ..........and thus, do more marking!

Our current EB does not make a distinction between large and small classes. The workload is strictly on the basis of hours of contact. Thus, staff who teach the larger, usually first-year subjects, are disadvantaged when it comes time to mark assignments. The Bargaining team may attempt to separate teaching contact hours from marking, and give marking a loading within the "academic workload" that allows adequate, educationally sound assessment practices.

Academics have shown a remarkable flexibility to adapt to the increasing demands placed upon them by the economic rationalist approach to education. Some of these adaptations affect assessment. If the trend towards increasing teaching hours and student/teacher ratio continues, assessment and student learning will eventually suffer. Assessment is a key element in the creation of quality learning. Increasing workloads may put academic's sanity at risk; even worse, increasing workloads may put quality education at risk.

CRITERIA FOR MARKING	MARK AWARDED	MAXIMUM MARK
1. Presentation Technical aspects: font, length, format, citations Reference List in APA style ( Language aspects: spelling, sentence & paragraph structure, genre, language, punctuation, etc. (English as a second language standards will be applied)		7
2. Content Articles from reputable & varied journals, current & related to topic (6) Summaries of articles clear, logical, concise, accurate science (8) Evaluation of concepts to nursing practice significant, well-argued & supported (9)		23
TOTAL		30

Academic Workloads and Assessment

Abstract:

ASSIGNMENT FOR BIOSCIENCE (BIOL 300) PART A

HONG KONG: BIOSCIENCE (BIOL 300) PART A