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Mapping assessment tasks as an index of undergraduate student workload
Full text linkBACKGROUND
Modern assessment practices frequently embrace continuous assessment rather than single point end-of-semester summative assessment. Indeed, studies suggest pedagogical advantages with providing ongoing low stakes summative e-assessments (Holmes, 2015) with a recent systematic review suggesting that while limited, studies on formative quizzes are mostly positive (Morris, Perry, & Wardle, 2021). However, these studies tend to be completed in isolation without examining overall student workload and the possibility of over-assessment. Increased stress, anxiety and time management issues in undergraduate students led me to examine the workload of students engaged in full-time study in either the Bachelor of Agricultural Science or Biomedicine at La Trobe University.
AIMS
The objective of this study was to map the assessment requirements of students completing degrees in Agricultural Science or Biomedicine at La Trobe University as an index of full-time study workload.
DESIGN AND METHODS
The number, type, weighting, and due dates for assessments were obtained from subject coordinators and mapped across the 12-week semester plus end-of-semester assessment period. Subjects were combined based on degree structure with several possible combinations of electives mapped based on enrolment data. The number and weighting of tasks was then calculated for each of the twelve semester weeks plus end of semester based on a full-time (4 subject) load.
RESULTS
The number of assessment tasks for a fulltime student was greater in first year with an average of 55 tasks compared with 30 tasks for second and third year. Weighting of individual assessment tasks ranged from 0.83% to 30% during semester and 10 to 50% after semester, with students completing from 0-6 assessment tasks in any given week. Clear peak assessment times were notable at weeks 4, 6 and 12 coinciding with policy of early assessment by week 4, the mid-semester and end-of-semester periods.
CONCLUSIONS
Ongoing small stakes assessments coupled with larger summative assessments, when considered across multiple subjects lead to increases in student workload, potentially resulting in over-assessment that impedes rather than supports student learning.
REFERENCES
Holmes, N. (2015). Student perceptions of their learning and engagement in response to the use of a continuous e-assessment in an undergraduate module. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 40(1), 1-14.
Morris, R., Perry, T., & Wardle, L. (2021). Formative assessment and feedback for learning in higher education: A systematic review. Review of Education, 9(3), e3292
Generative artificial intelligence literacy amongst science students
Full text linkBACKGROUND
The emergence of ChatGPT 3 at the start of 2023 was greeted with a mix of opinions about whether generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools could be used to improve our teaching or were an obstacle to maintaining academic integrity and student learning (reviewed in Rasul et al., 2023). Early discussions, particularly media coverage, were focused on university and academic opinions at the expense of the student voice (Sullivan et al., 2023). Universities have a responsibility to ensure all students are digitally literate and able to make ethical choices about generative AI in their work and studies.
AIMS
This research examined students’ awareness, experience and confidence in their ability to use ChatGPT and other generative AI tools ethically.
DESIGN AND METHODS
An online survey was distributed to all students at Edith Cowan University at the beginning of semester one, 2023, with a mix of closed and open-ended questions. Quantitative data were analysed in SPSS, while qualitative data were thematically coded.
RESULTS
At the start of the semester, most students (n=1135) had heard nothing or very little about ChatGPT and other generative AI tools. However, Science and Engineering students had significantly more awareness and experience with generative AI compared to other schools, including Medical and Health Sciences. However, some students were more confident in their ability to use generative AI ethically than expected given their lack of practical experience. Qualitative data showed that while many Science and Engineering students were excited about the potential of AI, they also had concerns about its reliability and how it would impact their studies and society as a whole, and they expected the University to supply resources and training.
CONCLUSIONS
University students, and Science and Engineering students in particular, are engaged with the emergence of ChatGPT and other generative AI, but want more support to work through the benefits, risks, and practical applications for their work. As a result of this research, Edith Cowan University has introduced ChatGPT resources and training for students.
REFERENCES
Rasul, T., Nair, S., Kalendra, D., Robin, M., de Oliveira Santini, F., Ladeira, W. J., ... & Heathcote, L. (2023). The role of ChatGPT in higher education: Benefits, challenges, and future research directions. Journal of Applied Learning and Teaching, 6(1).
Sullivan, M., Kelly, A., & McLaughlan, P. (2023). ChatGPT in higher education: Considerations for academic integrity and student learning. Journal of Applied Learning and Teaching, 6(1), 1-10. https://doi.org/10.37074/jalt.2023.6.1.1
Late Ordovician Conodonts and Macrofossils from Subsurface Carbonates near Quandialla and Inferred Depositional Age of the Currumburrama Volcanics in South-Central New South Wales
Full text linkLate Ordovician conodonts and macrofossils (corals, calcareous algae and bryozoans) were recovered from an unnamed limestone unit within the Currumburrama Volcanics, intersected in drill hole CBMD006 located in the vicinity of Quandialla and Caragabal in south-central New South Wales. The conodont assemblage from the lower part of the limestone unit is characterized by moderately common Belodina compressa elements and is assigned to the B. compressa Biozone of late Sandbian age, consistent with corals from the upper part of the limestone which suggest a latest Sandbian to earliest Katian age. These fossils support direct correlation with an unnamed carbonate unit within the Lake Cowal Volcanic Complex previously reported near Marsden, about 18 km to the WNW. Together these palaeontological and biostratigraphic studies provide crucial age constraints for the Upper Ordovician volcanic sequences distributed in the southern Junee–Narromine Volcanic Belt (JNVB). Furthermore, they underpin precise correlation with the well-dated marine shelf successions and associated volcanic sequences exposed in the central and northern part of the JNVB, within the Ordovician Macquarie Volcanic Province in central New South Wales
Black Holes in the Space of Literature: Gravitational Spacetime Singularities Applied to Maurice Blanchot’s Fictionality Face-to-Face with the Mystery of the Other
Full text linkThis article investigates and substantiates how Maurice Blanchot’s novels and récits collapse under their own gravity or in Blanchot’s words under “the gravity of one single word,” to form spacetime singularities/Neuters in the space of literature, where conception of the classical Einsteinian nonquantum spacetime continuum breaks down and where Hawking-Penrose theorems of spacetime singularities supersede; even though this supersedure entails General Theory of Relativity as its substratum. While spatiotemporal issues in Blanchot’s fictionality have to do with classical spacetime continuum and curvature, with establishing their legitimation through responsible and ethical relation with other persons as the only certain foothold to get at the authentic essence of time under the tutorship of Emmanuel Levinas, they are on the other hand subsisting on quantum theories engaged with the mystery of the Other whose wishful authenticity seems infinite, uncertain, and ungraspable ad infinitum. This is where this twofold Otherness having been dragging and spaghettificating itself from the beginning of time towards its end; that is, from the Big Bang to the Big Crunch, does emerge “to find the temporal transcendence of the present toward the mystery of the future” as Levinas asserts, so as to actualize our “horizontal escape” towards an infinite ecstasy face-to-face with “the Other that is time.
Australian Regional Literary History: Rethinking Limits and Boundaries
Full text linkThis paper emerges from a panel discussion at the ‘Texts and Their Limits’ conference (2021) between four scholars in the field of Australian regional literary history to consider its current concerns, practices and relationship to the frameworks of Australian literary studies. The panel flagged a renewal of regional literary scholarship in Australia through exploration of the panelists’ own projects and collaborations in regional and rural Victorian and Western Australian communities. Drawing on their reflections on the doing of regional literary history, the conversation canvassed the distinct qualities of contemporary regional Australian literary scholarship; the role of place, situated practice and community engagement in this field; and the implications for the regional literary studies of the always unsettled boundaries and status of the ‘region’ in Australian life. Following the original panel event, this paper discusses questions such as: what is regional literary history, where is it going, and what are limits?
(Re)considering Australian Geography with First Nations Literature - Jeanine Leane’s Walk Back Over
Full text linkTaking First Nations literature as a point of entry, the aim of this paper is to reconsider Australian geography. Focusing on the poetic collection Walk Back Over by Wiradjuri poet and academic Jeanine Leane, the current study considers the role of culture in our understanding of Australian geography, and the central place of vision and visuality in the transmission of geographical knowledge. Reading Walk Back Over requires the reader to look beyond the text, beyond colonial-settler geography in order to see another geography of Australia. In doing so, Jeanine Leane brings into the light another geography and, therefore, another history of the land.
Key words : First Nations Literature, Jeanine Leane, Geography, Vision, Culture, Postcolonialism
 
Resisting Action: Slow Response and Care-Full Movement in a Post-Fire Terrain
Full text linkInitially I stood at a threshold peering into a place of momentous ending. I shook my head. Gundungurra country needs to burn, I imagine its people say across time, just not like this. There is a requirement for care-full in/action when living with and on a post-fire terrain while still in trauma. It is a difficult balancing act for humans who like to fix things. Beyond the domestic clean-up of burnt buildings and infrastructure, my teachers await my attention. They are not of the human kind, rather they are the critters that perch in branches or skitter under rock. They are the soil movers, the crevice crouchers and the mark makers. They are the stirring plants and the underground tendrils of fungal hyphae. They send slow signals and resist tidy aesthetics. They challenge the perception of “dead” and question short-term human economies of usefulness. Ultimately, they remind me that home is made up of many intersecting homes weaving, twisting and turning in a constant process of becoming
Setting Fire to the Poetic Correspondence of Multispecies Relationships
No full textThis poetic work is a multispecies love letter seeking to make the reader aware of the strange aporia of human ‘love’ for animals.[1] Contradictory human expressions of love, care, indifference, and harm towards animals can be seen in words that change perceptions of animals (as individuals, groups or in general). Consider the changing status of a ‘pet’ cat being discarded and becoming ‘feral’. Is ‘it’ a ‘pest’ to be ‘culled’, not even ‘killed’ or ‘put to sleep’ or can ‘they’ be ‘rescued’? This work explores multiple and conflicting affective outcomes words have on building compassion, understanding and support for animals, or adding to misconceptions which can result in disregard or violent treatment. The words we use to represent animals and express our relationships to them can reduce animals to iconic national symbols and supportive anthropocentric tools, or to draw out the diversity, multiplicity and intrinsic value of animal being and create space for animals in the text.
The poem focuses on the contemporary Australian context for the aporia of human love for animals. It grounds the work in place and time by using Australian phrases, idioms, slang, associations, terms and names for animals, plants, and places while concentrating on recent events of bushfires, droughts, floods, and pandemic isolation. It references ongoing Australian settler-colonial practices where human animal entanglements and conflicts are highlighted, including horse racing, hunting, bushwalking, fishing, and farming.
Repetition and wordplay are used to amplify, destabilize, complicate, confuse and decentre human perspectives. The method is informed by the fictocritical work of Ania Walwicz in horse utilizing ‘The process of associative thought and reflection. Improvisation and analysis. The flight of thought, a trajectory and reflection, retrieval, recoil. The use of multilevel text comprising poetics, theory and appropriated text’ (5). The poet aims to draw attention to the ways our relationships with animals are constructed and circulated through our use of language which forms an inherently anthropocentric frame of reference. Unresolved contradictions between intimacy and distance in human animal relationships are used to create a space of questioning to provoke thought.
Work Cited
Walwicz, Ania. horse: A Psychodramatic Enactment of a Fairytale. Crawley, Western Australia: UWAP, 2018. Print.
[1]Although encompassing both, ‘animals’ is used here to differentiate ‘animals of different species’ from ‘human animals.’ Terms like ‘nonhuman animals’ and ‘other animals’ are definitions centring humans, in terms of what is not human rather than what are these beings. Words like ‘beast’ also have othering meanings.