Summative co-assessment: A deep learning approach to enhancing employability skills and attributes

Abstract

Service-learning is a pedagogy that combines academic study with service to the community. Voluntary work placements are integral to service-learning and offer students an ideal opportunity to develop their employability skills and attributes. In a service-learning course, it was considered good practice to raise students’ awareness of the development of these skills and attributes. To enable this, the assessment in the course was adapted accordingly, and thus an innovative, summatively co-assessed oral presentation was introduced. This study investigates the effects of using this type of assessment, in which students were required to give an oral presentation of their critical reflections on the employability skills and attributes they had developed during the course. This practitioner research study was a small project using qualitative semi-structured interviews and a focus group with students engaged in service-learning. Although this study uses service-learning pedagogy as its basis, the concept and practice of summative co-assessment is transferable to other academic courses.

Value-adding to health professional student placement experiences: Enhancing work readiness and employability through a rural community engagement program

“…In addition to providing a platform for applying profession-specific capabilities in a variety of situations, it increases their appreciation of the context in which health care is delivered and of the social determinants of health (and illness). Others have made comparable observations about similarly structured, collaborative community engagement initiatives (Deeley, 2014), including the value in promoting students' awareness of local public health issues (Cashman & Seifer, 2008) and a social justice perspective on the delivery of health care (Marullo & Edwards, 2000). Such potential outcomes align with prospective employer and community expectations.…”

“…There are a range of different definitions such as work-integrated models (Universities Australia, 2015) service learning models (Stanton, Giles Jr, & Cruz, 1999) and experiential learning models (Kolb, 2014). Inherent within the different definitions, theories and applications however, is agreement that there are a number of student benefits for personal and academic growth (Deeley, 2014;Hébert & Hauf, 2015), collaborative practice (Croker, Brown, Little, & Crowley, 2016) and transformative learning (Caspersz & Olaru, 2017;Prout, Lin, Nattabi, & Green, 2014). Community benefits are less articulated and include co-produced outcomes where partnerships are initiated by communities to address areas of need (Jones, McAllister, & Lyle, 2016a).…”

Evaluation of the lasting impacts on employability of co-operative serious game-playing by first year Computing students: An exploratory analysis

“…may signify that respondents differentiate between learning activities that are related to the content of their degree -which SimVenture was not, except perhaps for students on the Business Information Systems degree -and those activities which, more strongly in hindsight perhaps, foster the three S's of self-efficacy, selfconfidence and self-esteem [16] and that students themselves are able to see the value of non-subject specific activities as promoting employability [13].…”

“…However, in this instance, O'Hara's advocacy of a less deterministic "ingredients list" approach to the construction of a teaching framework was adopted, where "the aims of any pedagogy must focus less on fixed and predetermined outcomes, and more on open-ended emergent outcomes" [12]. "…it is misleading to focus on employability skills within education as merely a set of strategic tools because this approach undermines the aims and processes of education" [13].…”

“…As part of the final presentation, groups are tasked with giving a critical evaluation of their co-operation and teamwork during the previous ten weeks of being a company, to signal the importance of reflecting on these employability attributes [13].…”