ASSESSING COMPETENCY IN A DESIGN DISCIPLINE.

A sustainable design for evidencing competency

Griffith University is located across 6 campuses in South East Queensland, Australia, and is ranked in the top 2% of universities worldwide. Griffith “believe in, strive for and celebrate the Remarkable” – and we can certainly attest that their PebblePad implementation has been quite remarkable indeed, reaching an uptake of 30,000 licenses in their first 3 years of adoption and with continued sustained usage across the entire institution ever since. For this project, PebblePad was adopted to support a course redesign in order to reflect changes to the Australian National Standard of Competency for Architects. They needed to ensure students were able to clearly understand what was being asked of them for each competency and criterion and provide sufficient evidence against them.

The Evidencing Competency Ambition 

The team needed a design solution that made the student learning as authentic as possible. Students needed to be able to upload their work for assessment, and have it assessed and feedback presented using the same learning platform. Reflection and self-assessment needed to be supported at three points in the process - before the task, immediately having completed the task, and before being assessed by teaching staff.

From a teaching perspective, PebblePad provided the ideal platform to ensure well organised delivery and assessment of each of the required criteria against the required knowledge domains. Student feedback indicated that they appreciated the clear structure of the course and content. 

The Successful Workflow

A PebblePad workbook was created, which housed all of the course information, instructions, competency information and worksheets to scaffold the evidencing process. Some key design elements included:

• The ability to stage release of workbook content as students progressed.

• All 27 worksheets, to cover each of the 27 competencies, kept neatly together.

• Three or four submission points were included where students could upload images of their work, allowing them to reflect on why the particular piece of work was chosen and to highlight clearly which parts of their work evidenced the criterion.

• Individual marking rubrics were provided for self-assessment and feedback sections were then completed by staff to assess actual proficiency.
  
  
  

Our PebbleVision video, while not specifically about this case study, provides a brief overview of how PebblePad can support some of the pedagogical and pebblegogical practices discussed in this case study.