Educators' experiences of marking reflective writing: using collaborative learning to improve practice.

Abstract

Reflective assignments represent an important component in the suite of health professionals' assessments, supporting professional identity formation, workplace learning, uncertainty tolerance and critical knowledge application. However, assessment is complex. Marking and feedback can be highly time-consuming, cognitive and emotional. Associated emotions (anxiety, stress, frustration), if unregulated, can detract from working memory, reducing cognitive capacity and compromising performance, with implications for marking quality. Different epistemological conceptions of criticality in reflection further compound quality of marking. Collaborative conversation was used to explore the experiences of seven experienced educators and their perspectives on marking reflective writing. This feminist research methodology is employed to improve practice through socially co-constructed understanding of that practice, achieved by analysing experiences, emotions and relationships. The purpose of the research was focused on improving examiners' experience, with the anticipation that this would improve their practice and enhance the quality of the assessment, for example improving reliability or feedback. Amongst the participants, marking reflection incited anxieties about personal workload, as well as students' emotional responses to grades and marks being 'wrong' or judged poorly by moderators; they responded by reading each essay multiple times and repeatedly revising feedback. All participants described a contrasting experience in a course in which collaborative paired marking was introduced. Marking and feedback were then viewed as both a shared task and as professional self-development, framing marking as a learning activity. Within examiner pairs, sharing interpretations of criticality in reflection and collaborating on feedback and grading widened individual examiners' interpretations of high-quality work, resulted in perceptions of fairer marking, reduced emotional load, and reduced perceived workload by removing the multiple rechecking of marks and feedback. A collaborative, open approach is therefore advocated to improve the practice of assessing reflective work, including perceptions of improved grading reliability and quality of feedback.