Proposed formative assessment tasks for Academic Writing and Research Skills modules

A fundamental principle of assessment is validity - we should be testing whatever we taught. When it comes to research skills and academic writing modules, we are teaching students to be able to independently research a topic via a set of ordered steps in a process. I personally am in faviour of a very hadns-on, demo-style of teaching, especially in the initial stages of the research process. When I teach finding and evaluating sources, for example, I ask students to follow my steps on their devices and do exactly as I do: I come up with example key words related to a general topic of students' discipline area and perform a search on the university's library website or Google scholar. I then look at titles and if suitable read the asbtracts to decide on a source all the while thinking aloud as if this is my topic and I am the researcher. I show the students my thinking process behind discarding or choosing an article. I read the abstract and then summarise the main findings in my own words for students to grasp more easily and explain how and why it would (not) fit my topic. If I get stuck, I change/ modify the keyowords or else switch database until I land on suitable sources. This is procedural knowledge that I explicitly and directly teach to students so they can apply to their own research on the module and beyond.

But let us look at assessment now. Using the final product for assessment is increasingly problematic now, so it has been suggested the process should be focused on in the form of more formative tasks - 1:1s or a portfolio of formative assessments (snapshots of students' work). In academic writing we teach a set of transferable skill as part of the research process. It is procedural knowledge, so it is logical to test the set of skills aquired through observing knowledge of procedure, i.e. if we are to test the process, the best way to do it is in real time in class, where students will be thinking aloud and showing me their process of performing the steps I taught them. An example of this would be using effective keywords to perform an initial search on a topic and make decisions to select a number of sources for further reading. Such workshop/skill assessment sessions can happen several times during the term to assess sets of skills related to the different stages of the research process:

Workshop 1 - keywords, databases, source identification (reading abstracts)

Workshop 2 - reading/note taking, summarising sources ideas and compiling a working document (annotated bibliography)

Workshop 3 - building an outline/ drafting structure (this is essentally buidling own argument on the basis of sources ideas and response to them in answer to the research questions/ aims). 

Workshop 4 - synthesising sources and building a paragraph

I feel this is a feasible model to test transferrable skills in real time giving the teacher an idea to what extent the ILOs have been achieved without the suspicion that additional tools would be used to shortcut and compromise stages of the process. This would also give students the confidence of progress and achievement and they would be less likely to resort to delegating part of the research process to genAI. It would show them research is not so difficult and it should be done with integrity and reponsibility.

Mirena Nalbantova