Effective Assessments

• This assignment may ask students to retrieve a variety of sources – articles, books, personal accounts, web sites – and describe the contribution of each source to an understanding of the topic.
• This can help students develop a sense of the scholarly conversation around a topic.

• A staged essay with an annotated bibliography, peer reviewed essay draft, final essay and reflections on how the essay could have been improved.

• Demonstrates the impact that the author’s background, intent and audience may have on the information presented, and may highlight the differences among various disciplines.
• Works well when students are asked to locate deliberately disparate sources, such as an article from a popular magazine or website and another from an academic journal, articles from conservative and liberal sources , articles from different disciplines, or a personal and an organizational web site.

• Builds awareness of the process of scholarship on a topic — what do researchers now know that they didn’t know before, how might the social context of research have had impact on a topic, etc.

• Builds understanding of research methodology, requires deep reading of a research paper, and improves information search skills as students locate and retrieve later papers that cite the original.

• Demonstrates that journal databases and search engines have different functions. This helps them learn to make deliberate choices about which finding tool to locate information in various fields, at differing levels, or in differing formats.

Demonstrate that disciplinary knowledge is developed through research and evidence.

• This highlights the distinction between popular and scholarly press, and helps students understand the differences in audience and level of authority.

• Heightens awareness of difference in perspective between the immediacy and detail of the contemporary account and the treatment of the event by later scholars.
• Students are often intrigued with old newspapers and magazines, and finding a topic, then using an index to find another article, helps them understand the use of indexes.

• This can require students to do almost everything involved with writing a paper, including preparing a literature review to identify gaps, and consider sources of data.

• This helps students both practice physically locating material and learn to identify the perspectives and approaches of different disciplines.

• Introduces students to standards and evidence based practice. Asking students to distinguish between licensed and freely available information helps them see what may be available in workplace settings and understand information as a commodity

• Introduces students to primary data sources, teaches them to synthesize information and meaning from data.

• Use online tool such as EndNote Online, Mendeley or Diigo and ask students to contribute annotated references. This can introduce managing and organising information, as well as copyright and licensing issues around sharing and distributing information.