“AuA: Show & Share, with Love”

The PSU CALOHEA team as has continued to raise awareness of the implementation of Authentic Assessment (AuA) at the university level. The team has convened several informal meetings with at least six faculty members, including the associate president for academics of the PSU Pattani campus. Eventually, the team members and stakeholders (e.g., university executives, students, and teachers) agreed to organize an event entitled the “AuA: Show & Share, with Love” on February 14, 2024 (i.e., Valentine’s Day). The event aimed to disseminate the results of CALOHEA RM1 to RM3, particularly to promote the AuA concept. There are 40 participants, including PSU executives, the CALOHEA team, faculty members, university students, and schoolteachers, joining the event in both online and onsite formats. The faculty members came from different faculties, such as the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, the Faculty of Sciences and Technology, and the Faculty of Education.

The three-hour program agenda includes several activities encouraging the audience to share and learn from each other. At the event, the CALOHEA team members were very pleased to have an associate president for academic affairs (Montira Leelakriangsak) deliver a welcome remark, followed by the head of the PSU CALOHEA team (Ekkarin Sungtong) introducing the CALOHEA project and its results. Next, one of our colleagues (Juta Tammachart), an educational measurement and evaluation expert, overviewed the concept of AuA and its implications at the program level to ensure student achievement (Please find the PPT by clicking here). Consequently, two program chairs, one from the educational psychology program and the other one from the Chinese language program, reflected on their experience planning and implementing the curriculum in which the program learning outcomes (PLOs) and yearly learning outcomes (YLOs) were assessed by using AuA based on AUN (ASEAN University Network) criteria. After that, three faculty members were invited to be panelists to share their experience designing the AuA at the course level, and one of our CALOHEA team members (Hamidah Musor) moderated this panel discussion. Finally, the deputy leader of the PSU CALOHEA team (Warapark Maitreephun) led the recap-reflect-recharge activity to share participants’ learning and ideas on how to apply the AuA in both program and course levels. (Please access the event photo here).

The CALOHEA team has learned from the activities that the participants have shown interest in applying AuA to their courses. They are very active and eager to learn the AuA concept by asking many questions during the event and trying to understand the alignments among PLOs, YLOs, and CLOs (i.e., course learning outcomes). It is not difficult for the CALOHEA team to get the key institutional actors on board since the university has set its policy to promote the AUN quality assurance framework. Especially this time, we could invite the PSU executive and faculty members from various faculties to join the event promoting AuA based on the AUN criteria. The feedback on “AuA: Show & Share, with Love” from the participants is positive, and they reflect that the CALOHEA team should offer more sessions on sharing AuA best practices so that the faculty members can learn various strategies to apply AuA to their instruction in different fields appropriately.

Two activities have been conducted to introduce the AuA concept at the course level. First, the CALOHEA team and the psychology program faculty members have convened a meeting to analyze the evaluation strategies stated in the course syllabus. After discussion, the members purposefully analyzed the evaluation strategies offered in the third-year psychology program (Please find the collected evaluation strategies of the third-year courses by clicking here because the students shared with the team that they were most overwhelmed and burned out while studying in the third year. Besides, they shared that many assignments were assigned until they did not have time to digest knowledge and reflect on their learning. In other words, the students spent most of their time only attempting to finish the assignments daily instead of focusing on their learning.

The evaluation strategies analysis concluded with three key findings. First, the evidence shows that 58 assignments and evaluated tasks were designed from all courses offered in the third-year program’s first semester. In comparison, the second semester has only 30 assignments and evaluated tasks. This result confirmed the students’ voices, reflecting their overwhelming workload in the third year. Secondly, the evaluation combines many small tasks and assignments. For example, the Psychological Innovation for Learning course has 14 items to evaluate students’ learning in solely one course. The evaluation items include 1) Participation in class activities, 2) Reflective worksheets, 3) Timeliness in submitting assignments, 4) Class attendance, 5) Essay “Teacher of Mankind,” 6) Learning content design worksheet, 7) Final exam, 8) Groupwork, 9) Project-based learning worksheet, 10) Project presentation, 11) Project report, 12 Self-development learning log, 13) Media and technology designed for presenting in the classroom, and 14) Classroom management project report. Based on the findings, the faculty members in this program agreed to redesign their course assignments. As a result, they reduced the number of assignments, created tasks more relevant to real-world tasks and situations for the students, and co-created authentic tasks and strategies to assess students’ learning authentically in order to reduce students’ workloads. Finally, some faculty members misunderstood that the authentic assessment is solely to observe students’ behaviors in the classroom. Thus, in the meeting, we learned what makes an assessment to be more authentic (Please find the meeting photo by clicking here). In the next step, the CALOHEA team will meet with individual faculty members in this program to ensure they successfully design and apply the AuA in their course.

The CALOHEA team and program members have learned that the success of promoting authentic assessment at the course level could not only work with individual lecturers. They must design the assignments and tasks together in order to achieve the PLOs and reduce students’ intense workloads. Thus, we design to discuss these issues with every faculty member in the program.

Visit the CALOHEA website (https://calohea.org/) to learn more and explore the available resources.