A Faculty Approach to Implementing Advanced, E-Learning Dependent, Formative and Summative Assessment Practices

Introduction: Drivers For Change

The Faculty of Pharmacy is one of ten Faculties within Monash University, with around 60 full-time academic staff and over 1000 undergraduate students studying Bachelor of Pharmacy and Bachelor of Pharmaceutical Science degrees. Senior Management in the Faculty has identified high quality, efficient teaching, and independent learning as high priority outcomes for the Faculty. In recent years, significant funding has been provided to create systems and procedures to support high quality education. From a senior management perspective, the Faculty performance identified in student experience surveys was both a key driver for change, and a key indicator of performance. As an example, scores on survey items related to the adequacy of ‘feedback’ were consistently low within the faculty. While other faculties shared this problem to some degree, our senior Faculty management staff were motivated to improve the teaching within the Faculty to address this issue, among others, in accordance with the desire for high quality, efficient teaching that promoted the independent learning attributes of students.

In addition, in our personal view, we saw a Faculty that historically had a deeply embedded history of traditional didactic teaching, with lectures, practical classes and tutorials being the major teaching and learning activities. A typical subject within a course consisted of around 36 lectures, six practical classes of three hours duration, and a number of tutorials. The advantage of this system largely stemmed from the efficiency of content delivery via lectures. Faculty staff, particularly those within basic sciences subjects, were not required to teach large numbers of small group classes, and were free to prepare lectures of high quality. This resulted in students consistently attending lectures given by experts in particular fields of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Science. Attainment and understanding of content were generally the major student requirements, and assessment results over time indicated that student attainment of these types of learning objectives was at a high level.

The disadvantage of this approach was that there was little in the way of active learning in many of the lectures – few teaching and learning activities gave students ‘time on task’ to develop their critical thinking skills, and few assessment tasks evaluated student capabilities in these areas. Students thus began each learning cycle (i.e. content topic) with lectures which initiated / encouraged a content attainment approach, and thus they often attended practical classes and tutorials with a view to completing the required content attainment. In summary, the learning was largely staff-driven, that is teacher-centred, and did not stimulate analysis of content or encourage novel thinking by students often enough. Figure 1 provides some substance to the above observations.

Figure 1.

Staff and student perceptions of the importance of different cognitive skills/alignment of learning objectives, teaching and learning activities and assessment