Reworked coursework: A study of the effect of offering an academic second chance

Summary

Final year undergraduate students were each required to prepare an appraisal of part of a research paper covering a specialist topic in an engineering discipline. These appraisals were presented in seminars, where the aim was to encourage constructive discussion and co-operation directed towards the subsequent reworking of the appraisals by the authors concerned. The coursework mark was based on the reworked version of the paper; the marker did not see the original attempt.

Analyses have been carried out to identify the nature of some of the changes which were made between the initial submissions and the final reworking; these support the opinion that the reworked appraisal is a useful educational strategy which serves to consolidate learning and promote significant discussion. The more able students managed to produce the greatest improvements in their work (despite there being less potential for this gain), the decisions made in enlarging the coverage of the appraisal were generally more prudent than those which led to the deletion of opinions or arguments, and several improvements in the scheme can be suggested to those who wish to adopt it for use in their own subject area.

This paper is a description of a scheme whose aim was to create and review an academic situation within which each student in a class would be encouraged to refine the quality of arguments expressed in his own written work, to identify and eliminate weaknesses in logic, content and presentation, and to do so partly through interaction with his peers and partly on his own. The development was prompted by the desire to help undergraduates to learn from the weaknesses which they and their peers can discern in carefully prepared coursework submissions, and to consolidate that learning by ‘reworking˚s seminar papers. The detailed arrangements for the reworking were planned to minimise the temptation for the student to try to mirror the views of his tutor, which would be declared to him in any written or oral comments from the tutor—or might be otherwise presumed. Reworking of coursework (which is by no means a new idea) was chosen as a model because it called for a type of constructive response to seminar discussion which is not demanding when a marked assignment is a fait accompli before the subsequent dialogue occurs.