Only yesterday, I had the opportunity to be a judge at young scientist award organized by STNSW. The training introduced a new concept of marking i.e. holistic marking. Holistic marking can be defined by looking at a candidate’s response as a whole and judging it against an objective criteria (Mathews and Lally, 2010), which is quite different than the analytic marking where each part of the response will be assessed separately against a marking rubric. Holistic marking has the advantages of being quick and reliable if done by more than one trained markers in ample time.
The STNSW young scientist award has adopted this type of marking scheme to judge the scientific effort employed by students at various levels in school. This type of marking allows viewing the efforts as a whole. So students are not disadvantaged by small mistakes. The success of this type of marking is the adequate understanding of the scheme by the markers, their training and amount of time employed (Charles, Clapham and Wall, 1996).
From the workshop, we already knew about this impression type marking. During benchmarking I actually found it hard. Because I am used to analytical type marking and compare the works of the students. I was a struggle to get over this usual reflex and follow the instruction of our trainers. I had the chance to mark year 7-12 biology science projects. Reading these projects, was a revealing experience. I was surprised to explore the creativity possessed by these little scientists who tried to follow the standards of scientific method and prepare their project. We were told that these were the schools’ best. Some of the projects appeared to be so naïve and demonstrated very little understanding of scientific investigation. However, some of the projects demonstrated maturity and in depth understanding. In this way I had a panoramic view of abilities of students. As we were judging on groups, this allowed us to have interesting exchange of views on what we thought of the works. This was even more interesting when we had differences in opinion. We identified our own logics, supported them or sometimes we had to change as well.
It was same on the actual judging day only we had more responsibility to judge correctly. We worked in pairs, shared our opinions and finalized our score. I earnestly appreciate the participants’ effort to identify variables, control variables, decide on a method, observe, record and present the result, discuss the investigation and finally to provide conclusion. Not everybody can be winners. But through participation students acquire skills, knowledge of conducting investigation. Moreover, this can ignite the students’ true potentials as future scientists.
References:
Charles, A. J., Clapham , C., & Wall, D. (1996). Test Construction and Evaluation.
Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
Mathew, R. & Lally, J. (2010). The thinking teacher’s toolkit: Critical thinking, thinking skills and global perspective. London: Continuum International Publishing.
Hi Rezwana
ReplyDeleteI agree with the points you raised about the benefits of holistic marking. It is a way of marking a large volume of projects in less time than it would take marking using an analytical scheme. It also ensures that students are assessed on their overall performance and understanding of scientific concepts without penalising errors or downfalls in one or more of the criteria.
There was a huge range of student abilities and efforts when it came to marking the projects and I found it very interesting to see at what level students had grasped scientific concepts at the various age groups. It did take some time to get comfortable using the rubric to mark against, but I found it easy once I had marked a few and had seen projects which were of a standard equal to the different levels. By judging the students projects on the basis that they contained clear, consistent and convincing evidence of their ability to plan and conduct a scientific investigation to communicate their work made it straightforward to grade the range of abilities of students according to their depth and quality of knowledge and understanding of this criteria.
The YS awards is an important step in encouraging students to explore scientific concepts and encourage them ask questions about how science affects their daily lives and hopefully inspire some students to take on further study about a particular field of science which interests them.
A good description of our experience at the STANSW young scientist award. I though the holistic marking was a good idea to appreciate the work of the student as a whole. However, initially I found it difficult to give a single mark. Some of the projects lacked one criterion but compensated for it in another area, and I was tempted to overlook the missing elements, however the specific criteria, training and expert advice got me back on track.
ReplyDeleteI, too, was pleasantly surprised at the quality of work and effort put into the projects. It goes to show the cognitive abilities of these students and how we can go about with planning and conducting first hand investigations.