Abstract
Since Spring 2020, the education system has been experiencing a revolution. After facing the sudden transition from in-person classes to emergency remote teaching (ERT), teachers and students adjusted to a flexible alternation of online, offline, hybrid, or blended teaching. Under these unusual circumstances, assessment has been challenging with regard to online cheating and student motivation. At the same time, instructors started to experiment, thus addressing issues that had already been raised before the emergency (e.g. the need for meaningful tasks).
Based on preliminary research carried out during the first wave of the pandemic, this study investigates experiences of authentic and continuous assessment (ACA) in higher education. Since the academic year 2020–2021, three Italian teachers of English Linguistics and over 368 students have been involved in reflecting on their teaching and learning experience during the pandemic. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected through online questionnaires and semi-guided interviews. The outcomes of this study show that both teachers and students feel the same need for change. ACA could be an intriguing possibility, even if further research and specific training are needed. By comparing teachers’ experiences with students’ experiences during these trying years, this chapter aims to gain further insight into a tool for pedagogy that could be useful for in-person, online, blended, or hybrid teaching scenarios.
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Notes
- 1.
This preliminary study is part of a broader investigation for a PhD thesis to be discussed in Spring 2023. It involved 29 EFL teachers from 13 different Italian universities and over 800 students, and it collected information about challenges and opportunities offered by ERT from teacher and student perspectives.
- 2.
This necessarily raises the question of what this meant for teachers who were not on a salary and who were, for example, paid by the hour. Although this is too complex a topic to tackle within the limited scope of this chapter, it should be noted that, broadly speaking, the pandemic caused insecurity across a range of categories. This instability, inside and outside of academia, was exacerbated for women, especially those in insecure employment (Churchill 2020; Wenham et al. 2020).
- 3.
(I) refers to individual evaluation, (P) refers to a task accomplished by two or three students, (G) refers to group work (four to five students), and (PE) refers to peer-evaluation.
- 4.
The latter was also avoided by using specific anti-plagiarism software and proctoring tools (e.g. Turnitin and Respondus), yet this goes beyond the scope of the present paper, and it presented its own challenges.
- 5.
In large-size courses, teachers could be helped with the marking by teaching assistants, which would of course require investment in additional staff.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank all the lecturers and students who participated in this study and allowed me to conduct my research. I would also like to thank the reviewers for their insightful comments, which helped me dig deeper and gain a more comprehensive understanding of my data.
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Giacosa, A. (2023). Authentic and Continuous Assessment During the Pandemic: Teachers’ and Students’ Perspectives. In: Fiorucci, W. (eds) Language Education During the Pandemic. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35855-5_2
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