Many thanks to Andrew Cosgrove for his reply to my previous post on written V typed exams. I absolutely agree with Andrew about the importance of handwriting and am not for a minute suggesting that this be neglected. My point was simply that in nearly all of our universities in the UK traditional summative assessment methods are inconsistent with the way students write during much of their education and in later life.
Coincidentally this is a point emphasized by Dai Hounsell, professor of higher education and vice-principal at the University of Edinburgh, in an article in the most recent edition of the THE. Professor Hounsell says:
“Almost all universities that I’m familiar with require their students to submit work in word-processed form, if not electronically. Yet many of them still cleave to a system where ’sudden death’ handwritten exams are a major element in determining degree classification.”
One problem with this is purely physiological. “Computer use means that students are losing the capacity to write quickly for lengthy periods. You just create muscular cramp.”
More importantly, the advent of information technology has changed the way people write. “We can write things in almost any order and go back to revise them. Handwritten exam answers involving extended prose and essays are increasingly calling for strategies that students are no longer familiar with.
“That in itself would be problematic, but what we also have to remember is that those strategies aren’t required in the world beyond university either. Students are not going to go into jobs where someone is going to say ‘I’m sorry, but you have got to submit a handwritten answer in the next 30 minutes.’ It is a sort of white elephant and in many ways I think there is a lack of readiness to confront that.”
Would it not be more appropriate to offer a range of assessment methods, including handwritten and typed essays as well as other innovative assessment techniques, which better reflect the wider world of education and work, as well as catering for students’ varying strengths?
And if this is the case then what might be the key barriers preventing this from happening ?
Filed under: assessment | Tagged: assessment, handwriting, HE, summative, word-processed
Thanks for the mention, Roger, I’ve now leapt into web 2.0 with a blog of my own. It is to explore the idea of introducing laptop computers in the early years of school to allow learning to take place when handwriting is slow to develop. I feel that many children’s academic careers are cut short at age 6 or 7 because they cannot write quickly or neatly enough, and no amount of drilling or practice can improve this. It teaches them to hate school, and lose faith in their own ability to learn, and in the school’s ability to teach.
http://lllol.wordpress.com/