Case study: Portfolio approaches in the undergraduate Global Development degree programme

Department of Politics
Judith Krauss

Judith Krauss outlines how portfolio approaches are used within the Undergraduate Global Development degree programme by focusing on the assessment for the first year undergraduate module ‘Foundations of Global Development’. This module is part of a series of core modules at each level of the course involving problem-based learning (PBL) approaches. The portfolio assessment is intended to develop students’ transferable skills by focusing specifically on engagement in the PBL process. The assessment includes marks for contributions and personal reflections alongside an individual essay and a group-based report and presentation. Judith reports challenges involved in developing frameworks and criteria to support the assessment and dealing with the increased burden on staff of increased administration and transactional costs of a more diverse and complex form of assessment. However, this has had benefits for students in being able to learn and be assessed in a different way, balancing individual and group learning and placing increased focus on reflection and the individual student development journey.

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Transcript

I will be speaking to our first year undergraduate module, which is called Foundations of Global Development, which is part of our interdisciplinary undergraduate degree in global development. It was developed across Environment and Geography, Politics and History, amongst others, by Eddie Ju, Phil Roberts, Ingrid Kvangraven, and others. And the logic behind making this an interdisciplinary degree is very much that the field itself, global development, is very much interdisciplinary, and the objective is to prepare students for working in development or in a related field. Obvious caveat that development, international development, global development in and of itself is problematic terminology, inherently colonial. But unfortunately that's sort of what students look for if they want to get into this field. So we have kept the broad name, even though our approach tries to emphasise decolonial approaches very much.

So, yes, development is a very competitive field to get into therefore also in our assessment we try to prioritise transferable skills. So in our first year, which is also taught through problem based learning, so, you start with a seminar at the start of the week where they look at a problem, then there's a lecture in the middle to give some more background and then by the end of the week they feed back their research. It's very student centred, student led learning. So again, with the objective of providing transferable skills and our assessment on this module is also very much meant to convey transferable skills. So this past year our assessment's constellation was based on 5% for participation. So ensuring that students are contributing in every seminar, 5% for a reflection. So they had to write a thousand words where they thought about their individual contribution, the group dynamics, their own trajectory, their own growth, also the method of problem based learning.

So, to what extent was this beneficial? 20% of their assessment was a group presentation, we had 3 to 4 students per group on a pre-set topic, which they also had to run past the tutor, 30% was based on an individual essay, and then 40% of the mark was based on a summer group project, which was again, groups of 3 to 4 students working to put together an NGO report or NGO style report. And the idea is that throughout these different assessments, they have an opportunity to test their problem based learning approach, the seven steps of problem based learning, also in how they work together and how they approach these different assessments. There's obviously an implicit evaluation of their own process also, on the group presentation and the NGO report, how they worked together, how they divided the labour. Initially we had run also the presentation and the group project in such a way that 5% of those grades were also an individual self reflection that they had to write. But then it was scrapped because it's very hard to administer relative to the weighting of the overall assessment. It's also a bit hard to mark if it's sort of for specific different assessments. And it also turns out that one student actually just copied their self reflection across each of these different assessments that they were meant to write a self reflection for. So ultimately we decided we'll just do 5% self reflection for the whole year. The benefits of these, of this approach to assessment is in our opinion, that students have an opportunity to learn in a different way and be assessed in a different way. It's very much about working together as a group, learning individually and as a group, also on time management and division of labour. From the self-reflection that I marked a little, a few months ago, there was very much an appreciation from our students for the opportunity to reflect on their own learning, to reflect also on their own journey, in terms of what they learned in the course of the PBL seminars. Also their trajectory of working together as groups in the presentations and in the NGO reports. And it also gave them an opportunity to appreciate the work that they'd done and their own growth and also reflect on, you know, how does this compare to other types of education and assessment that I've been part of. And generally they were quite happy with it. Some of the challenges, as I've already mentioned, it's quite hard to administer, for our administrator. She, on a regular basis, had sort of, quite a lot of assessments that were coming in all at the same time. And also, you know, just tiny 5% of the overall mark. But nevertheless, you know, need to be administered and need to be looked after well. And because of modularisation and semesterisation and we are only allowed to continue our problem based learning core modules in one semester, down from two terms, which means we had to scrap quite a lot of our diversity of assessment. And we've now essentially spread out different types of assessment across three different core modules in the three undergraduate years, so students still have an opportunity to do a presentation, to write a group report, and all these kinds of things, but it's just spread out. It's sort of sequential now. And another challenge, if this is something you want to pursue in your own department, you might have to expect to do battle to some extent with the Board of Studies just because of the diversity of assessment that you have to argue for, concerns around student needs and student abilities. Are we asking too much? And also with admin colleagues, just because of the administration and transactional costs involved in administering this, also always means you have to develop marking criteria for each of these different assessments, including on how do you actually mark a reflection. And that's before we've talked about obviously the transactional costs that group work can entail amongst the students.