NM3223: Digital photography and imaging

Self Assessment

Self Assessment report DW 1

Self Assessment report DW 2

(Please let me know if you see any discrepancies in marks entry. If you want to improve participation component of your marks or need clarification please drop me a line.)

Important: Self assessment is mostly about your audience perception... it is NOT about what your think your artwork is worth. You may spend 40 hours working on an assignment but if your audience think it is not reaching them, it means you have made some mistake in you creative decision process. So please base your assessment on audience reaction, it is the only way one can improve quality of an artwork.

Definition of self assessment

Self assessment involves students taking responsibility for monitoring and making judgements about aspects of their own learning. It can be broken down into two stages:

  • Identifying criteria to apply to an understanding of subject content
  • Making judgements about the extent to which they have met these criteria and standards

'Self assessment' is a learning process in itself. It is a way of improving student learning by passing on skills of evaluation and critical judgement to students. In this sense the term 'self evaluation' may be more appropriate since it is about developing students' ability to make judgements about the quality of material.

Ground Rules for assessment

  • Identify strengths of work first, before moving on to areas for improvement
  • Try to make comments descriptive rather than evaluative
  • Give feedback based on concrete behaviour/examples rather than giving a general impression
  • Back up comments with evidence
  • Make sure the feedback can be clearly understood

Participation component of assessment: Participation assessment is based on following criteria

  • Constructive involvement during critique sessions
  • Self assessment blog - rationality of assessment, contextualising your performance
  • Attendance and time management
  • Rating of your assessment/artwork by other students

participation component is dynamic. In the sense, if you address above criteria your participation component will improve else will go down. Meaning, every-time i update assessment report your participation component may go up or down based on how well you address participation criteria.

Finally:
For this module i am trying to bring complete transparency to the process of assessment (from my side). Five years of my research in design pedagogy tells me that meaningful learning can only take place when assessment is in control of students. But i must say there is a component of assessment where i/you don't have any control - which is conversion of marks to letter grade. Grade conversion works on relative principle. Meaning, if person who scores maximum marks gets an "A", rest will be below him/her in relative order.