Catering for NESB students

Discipline Area

Core Curriculum Unit offered across all Faculties (Australia, Asia and the Pacific)

Key assessment issue addressed

Assessment of large class enrolled in Day, Distance and Online modes;

Multiple Choice tests to promote motivation

Need to cater for NESB

Need to cater for different intelligences

Set Choice Topics to guard against cheating

Open Choice Topics to provide opportunities for Distance mode adult students to communicate their experience

The initiative

Essay Assignment - 5 marks for the Proposal and 25 for the Essay

Essay topics for Day and External students are different. Recognising the general maturity and wide range of life experiences of Distance Education students, we offer this group the opportunity to draft their own choice of essay topic. Considerable guidance is provided to assist students make their choices. We provide an Essay Proposal form, and also provide examples of effective and not-so-effective proposals done by previous students. These exemplars include staff comments and suggestions for improving the Proposals.

The Proposal is marked and staff make suggestions about the level of difficulty of the proposed topic, the availability of resources, structure of sections and the like.

Distance students whose geographic location, work routines or lack of Australia-Asia resources prevent them from developing their own choice of topic are offered the choice of selecting a Set Topic for their essay. Internal students are also required to write on one of the Set Topics. We found that offering Day students their own choice of topics semester after semester led to some dishonest practices, and we had to introduce measures to ensure that as far as possible, students submitted their own work to satisfy the essay task.

The Essay assignment is evaluated using an Evaluation Sheet which evaluates students' work in terms of Presentation, Content and Argument.

End of Semester Examination

The examination in AAP is a 2.5 hour written, closed book exam weighted at 50% of total marks for the Unit. We weighted the exam in this way for security reasons. We wanted to be sure that a pass on AAP represented the students' own work.

The examination involves a mix of questions. Some test understanding of key concepts developed through Examinable Readings. Others contextualise student's work in AAP through the use of fictional scenarios as a basis for both short answer and short essay questions. These questions ask students to imagine themselves in situations which we believe represent the growing involvement of the tertiary educated sectors of Australian and Asian countries.

Questions on videos recognise different ways of learning, different intelligences and ask students to respond in terms of the scenes they remember from the videos.

I often write questions which reach out to our students studying overseas, and compose fictional situations which describe scenes and events they are familiar with.

Exam questions include words and phrases in bold type which are designed to assist NESB students focus on the key words and issues in questions.

The reason for the initiative's effectiveness

The highly contextualised essay and examination questions mirror the situation we believe Australian and regional students will find themselves in as they work cross culturally. These questions assess whether students can adapt what they have learned to likely futures.

Further details

Dr Philip Kitley
University of Southern Queensland
kitleyp@usq.edu.au