Accounts of Current
Practice
Using Patchwork Text Assessments to Support and
Document the Learning Process
Alfredo Gaitán - [email protected]
Joseph Adonu - [email protected]
Maja Jankowska - [email protected]
University of Bedfordshire
www.beds.ac.uk
At the last two CRA Annual Residential Seminars (2012 and 2013) I have run a workshop aimed
at allowing the participants to experience what it is like to produce a Patchwork Text Assessment
(PTA) on a topic of their choice. We have then discussed different features of this type of
assessment and identified opportunities it offers. Finally, we have considered, from a research
point of view, ways in which PTAs can make visible the learner’s process of construction of
knowledge, including gains in subject knowledge and epistemological shifts.
These workshops are based on the experience of using a PTA in an undergraduate programme in
psychology for the last four years and conducting some action research.
Background
At the end of the academic year 2008-9 the teaching team of a Level 6 (one semester long) unit in
Critical Social Psychology reviewed the teaching and assessment strategies. The latter included a
position paper (1,000 words) and a full-blown 2,500-word essay on a set question. The experience
so far, was that the weakest students struggled with the complex literature and performed poorly
or plagiarised. The team agreed that the students needed to have ownership of their learning and
should be able to choose a topic of their interest (options were: aggression, personhood,
relationships and emotions) and apply the critical perspective, comparing the results with how
mainstream social psychology conceptualised the topic. We also decided to encourage the
learners to draw on their prior knowledge, rather than assume they would start from scratch. This
change was inspired by experiential learning (Kolb, 1984; Boud, Cohen & Walker, 1993; Gregory,
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