Learning by Doing: Section 5.1

5.1 Self-assessment of welding skills

At an agricultural college, students were taught the theory of a range of welding techniques in weekly lectures in a classroom. Each week they had a practical session in a workshop in which to apply the theory. These practical sessions took the following form:

Stage 1	The tutor demonstrated a welding technique.
Stage 2	Students attempted to use the technique themselves, under supervision.
Stage 3	Those students who completed the weld took it to the tutor who gave feedback on the good and bad features of the weld.

In practice there were a number of problems with this approach:

Students paid insufficient attention to the demonstration.
Students undertook the practical task very slowly and with little care. Some regularly failed to complete a single weld in the practical session.
The tutor had to offer the same advice, and repeated demonstrations, to many of the students, despite a full explanation during the initial demonstration .
A large proportion of completed welds were of a poor standard, with little evidence of students having applied a theoretical understanding of the type of weld to their practical work.
Students seemed quite unreflective about what they were doing and why and what was going wrong. They appeared to leave it entirely up to the tutor to identify weaknesses in their welds, even when these were obvious.
The same basic mistakes were made week after week.

In terms of experiential learning theory these problems were caused by:

students not planning their own work or having criteria by which to judge their work, in advance;
students not reflecting upon their work or assessing it;
students not having the opportunity to go round the learning cycle a second time in order to correct mistakes;
students not playing an active and responsible part in their own learning.

Faced with this situation, the tutor introduced a self-assessment process involving the following stages:

Stage 1	The tutor demonstrated the welding technique.
Stage 2	The students discussed and devised criteria for assessing the quality of a finished weld of this type. The tutor prompted with reference to the theory introduced in the lecture when necessary. These criteria were then written on the blackboard.
Stage 3	Students attempted to use the technique themselves. The tutor invited students to ask questions, especially about the implications of the criteria for techniques, but did not offer answers or demonstrations.
Stage 4	Students bent their welds to destruction and assessed their quality using the criteria they devised in stage 2.
Stage 5	Students presented their welds and their self-assessment to the tutor, giving themselves a mark out of 5 for each of the criteria. The tutor limited contributions to questions such as: "And how would you avoid that weakness next time?" to help students plan their next attempts at undertaking the welds.
Stage 6	Students repeated stages 3, 4 and 5, undertaking a second weld, testing and assessing it, and presenting their conclusions and self-assessment to the tutor.

The main consequences of using self-assessment in this way were:

Students paid more attention to the demonstration.
Students joined in a purposeful discussion which related theory to practice in devising the criteria that they would later use themselves to assess their own work.
Welds of higher quality, with fewer elementary errors, were produced.
Students reflected about their own welds, and were able correctly to diagnose weaknesses using their own criteria. They were, if anything, over harsh with themselves in their marking.
Because they worked so much faster, they had time to undertake a second weld, learning from mistakes in their first weld.
Students planned the second weld carefully, taking into account their self-assessment of their first weld.
Subsequent evaluation indicated that their second welds were of a consistently higher standard than their first welds, showing that they were learning from the experience of carrying out and reflecting upon their first weld.
Students started asking more questions, during theory classes, about practical implications, such as: "What would cause a poor weld?" and "How would you avoid that kind of problem?". This change in student involvement led to a change in the nature of theory sessions from being 'chalk and talk' towards tutor-led discussions.

The main features of this innovation, in terms of experiential learning theory, are:

1	Students started with theory (Conceptualisation).
2	Students planned their work and devised criteria by which outcomes would be assessed and, in doing so, related theory to practice ( Experimentation).
3	The planning stage was followed by attempting to undertake the weld (Experience).
4	Students tested and assessed their own work (Reflection).
5	On the basis of their self-assessment, they revised their ideas about how to undertake the weld (Conceptualisation) and planned their second weld (Experimentation). This gave a second opportunity for Experience through undertaking the second weld, and for Reflection, through assessing it. This took students through two complete learning cycles.
6	Students had increased opportunities to be involved responsibly throughout.

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Created by Claire Andrew
Page created 10 January 2001