tools to critically evaluate a piece of work in terms of strengths and weaknesses. By contrast, critical
traditions or schools thought exist within certain disciplines (e.g. sociology, social psychology or
education); they develop rigorous critiques of a dominant paradigm and propose radically different
perspectives in terms of epistemology and ontology. While participants in the workshop were asked
to write new questions about the topic drawing on the critical material, in real life students formulate
new questions before they search for critical sources. A third patch followed in which participants
formulated the following questions as part of a second cycle of inquiry:
How can we break the system of factory education and unlock creative minds?
How can we encourage divergent thinking in all discipline areas of HE?
How can we reflect this in the 'non factory' curriculum in HE?
For obvious reasons participants in the workshop were not able to write answers to their new sets
of questions or share their newly constructed knowledge.
The last stage involved writing a final commentary. The participants' text sums up their experience
very clearly:
The process enabled us to explore our existing knowledge. This was reviewed in the light of new
evidence (from the report). This enabled us to reconsider creativity in the sector and the impact of
the historical development of education.
We were able to review our own divergent thinking to develop a more focused- based
transformational approach to the topic. So this will now enable us to take this new understanding
of the learning (and unlearning) process and explore it in new ways.
Conclusions
From our experience of using PTAs in a unit for the last four years and conducting research on our
practice, we can conclude that this type of assessment is a valuable tool with which learners can
document their learning through different stages of the process, from beginning to end.
PTAs can support the learning process (construction of subject knowledge that takes into account
prior knowledge) by providing a structure for the production of texts in a regulated manner. The
learner can review (and revise) previous texts which become the stepping stone for the next one.
PTAs take away the stress from assessments by requiring that learners only write a short piece at
a time and allowing them to edit them as many times as they want (but not replace them with totally
new ones). The high submission rates support this.
PTAs increase a sense of ownership by allowing students to use a more personal, experiential and
reflective style. This can explain the virtual disappearance of plagiarism.
THE CENTRE FOR RECO I%9