Developing the mapping tool
The team undertook a number of mapping exercises to investigate the practicalities of mapping against varying sets of parameters. We started with one course, 'Object Oriented System Development' an early subject in the degree program taught across in all three localities. Each member of the team analyzed each assessment task in the course to assign a value in terms of adding to a student's acquisition of graduate qualities. We completed a table to allocate a ranking of high, medium, low or nil to each sub-category of the seven University graduate qualities. Our ranking was based on perceptions of whether each graduate quality category was explicitly or implicitly reflected in the assessment task. A comparison of all the tables produced indicated a good deal of agreement in terms of basic graduate qualities, but further analysis revealed highly significant variations relating to how qualities were gained and whether they related to outcomes or to the processes of the task.
The early mapping exercise was repeated in Malaysia by 3 senior staff members from the Sepang Institute of Technology who teach many of the University's IT courses. Each staff member was provided with a copy of all assessment pieces used in Object Oriented System Development, a detailed description of the graduate qualities and the mapping table. Once again the exercise showed broad agreement for most of the graduate qualities but significant variations due to interpretation of the task and its relationship to a graduate quality.
These preliminary graduate quality mappings were crucial in affirming our realization that intrinsic graduate qualities can be interpreted in so many different ways when relating them to assignment tasks. As well as the Malaysian educators, each project member viewed the task from a different point of view. Some were relating to their own teaching, others to how they interpreted the requirements of the task, or the final outcomes required. Then another viewed this as the process that students would undertake to get to the outcome. The variable interpretations among project team members gave us an indication of how students might similarly have issues of interpretation when faced with assignment requirements, and how curriculum writers might design for differently interpreted outcomes, despite providing marking criteria. As a consequence, the team decided that an additional model of 'measurement' was needed to address the relationship between assessment tasks and course objectives.
A systematic analysis of graduate qualities or assessable outcomes suitable for developing a mapping tool required another parameter - course objectives. At this stage we turned to one of the later interpretations of Bloom's Taxonomy (Writing Objectives, 2004).
