Sunday 21 February 2010

Assessment as Dialog

I am now following a module on Online Assessment and still the term 'dialog' pursues me!

David Nichol from Strathclyde University has been a visiting 'speaker' on our discussion boards for the past few weeks and engaging with us on all things assessment but particularly around the topic of increasing self regulation in first year students. David sees feedback as a dialogic process and we have been discussing this and the cross over between both his work in this area and Diana Laurillards conversational framework.

David has written a paper called 'monologue to dialogue' and says
"its argument is that feedback as an imput message cannot improve learning on its own (just transmission) and that it must be conceptualised as an interactive dialogue with students actively contributing. Laurillards conversational framework is really a feedback as dialogue framework so I tried to show the value of her four characteristics of dialogue, slightly simplified for analytical purposes - adaptive, discursive, interactive and reflective."
I am very much looking forward to reading this paper to learn more and will post my thoughts on it here when I do!

To link this a little further I recently found the following slides from Diana Laurillard - just need a little more time to peruse and pull some thought together now!