ARC

Description of Good Assessment Practice

Title: Mr
Name: K.C. Tsang
Academic Position: Others
Name of Institution: The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Country: Hong Kong
Discipline: Others
Department/School: Design
Course title: Advertising Design Studio 3.1 - Copywriting
Course code: SD3833
Class size: 21-40
Course Year: Year 2
Assessment Title: An Online Learning Platform 'Jijijaja'
Assessment Type: Formative
Time allowed for assessment:
Target: Peer- and self-assessment
Learning outcomes of the assessment practice: Learning Outcome 1: To gain knowledge on advertisement and on ways to make an advertisement more effective.

Learning Outcome 2: To develop students’ creativity and their ability to make critical judgement (to develop students’ ability to come up with a lot of solutions to a single problem and select the best solution)

Key features and principles of the assessment practice: Key features
An online learning platform, named as “jijijaja” was produced to facilitate the learning and teaching of the copywriting course.

There were two main assessment tasks (i.e. “Identify & Imitation”) on the online platform for the course.

The first task included exercises representing 5 themes, namely metaphor, cute, mean, pun and poetic. For each theme, students were first required to identify three advertisements representing the theme, analyse the advertisements and then write their own.

The second task involved group work with around 5 students per group. Each group was given a layout of an advertisement and each group member was required to write something different for the advertisement. Each group was expected to select the best work in the group after discussion.

For both the first and second task, in addition to the teacher’s grading, students were required to assess their peers’ work based on a given rubric. How well students could assess their peers’ work was graded based on a “relevance” score. For each task, there was a ‘relevance’ score showing how close his/her rating of their peers was compared to the mainstream score. For example, if a student had a ‘relevance’ score of 99, it implied that his judgement of his peers’ work was close to the mainstream judgment. Students who had a low ‘relevance’ score were considered to have a weaker ability in making critical judgement of their peers, as his judgement of his peers’ work deviate significantly from the vast majority.

Principles of the assessment practice

The assessment practice aimed to help students develop an understanding that creativity is about coming up with as many alternatives as possible and to exercise the judgment to come up with the best. In order to assess their peers’ work, students would have to pay attention to them and think critically. They were encouraged to think critically before giving their marks and leaving comments as they would be graded on how well they assessed their peers’ work. At the same time, students could also learn from their peers’ comments and get a sense of how well their work is received.

Students’ judgment of their peers’ work was also assessed because judgment is very important in advertising as there is no right or wrong answer in the field. An advertisement is only considered as good given that most people consider it as good.
What are the best things about this assessment method? • It can force students to discuss and force them to look at other’s work critically.
• Improvement in English as they have to do more writing.
What are the challenges in implementing this assessment method? • Technical instability (e.g. uploading and downloading interruption, missing thumbnails) and technical difficulty in maintaining the online platform.
• Technical problems also led to students’ discipline problem, as some of them abused the instability of the platform and made up excuses for late submission.
• The teacher is unable to observe the group dynamics of the group work.
• The online platform lacks a humanistic component compared to face-to-face communication with students.
What do your students think about this assessment method? (Any evaluation?) Comments from student evaluation:

• “Now I discover that you can have so many interpretation on the same visual. In the past, I was always driven by the visual and think in only one way. Now, I know the possibilities of looking at the same visual in multi-angle and I trust the power of words.”
• “Now I think I have the analytical power when I discuss advertisement with others.”
• “If you want to write a good copy, you need to put yourself into the shoes of the one who read your ads.”
• “I always lock myself in one direction, but we can have new directions just by casual chatting. I can always learn from my classmates when we are in discussion.”
• “When rewriting my old work, the most difficult thing is to give up the original thought, and then look at it from the audience’s point of view. Only by doing so, you can come up with copy in different direction.”
Plans for changes/developments in future (if any):
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Creation date: 2015-10-16 17:07:46