Brief: 

Students participate in a live conversation that lasted for six (6) minutes to demonstrate their ability to apply ideas and evidence from educational psychology to educational practice.

Students were able to bring notes on an A4 piece of paper (two-sided) into the room and refer to these as required.

The rubric was designed around broad topics that were covered during the course along with student independence and quality of communication, the markers would live mark the broad topics and finalise marks following the session.

Detailed breakdown:

EDUC2102 is Educational Psychology: Learners and the Learning Process and is a course for initial teacher education students. This course provides ideas and evidence from educational psychology and supports students apply that knowledge to their educational practice. The interactive oral exam is the final assessment task for the course and delivered in the last teaching week of the semester.

From early in the semester, the course teaching staff were communicative and open about the upcoming interactive oral examination. For many students this was their first time completing a live interactive performance for an assessment task, so there was work around creating a safe environment for students. This included constructively aligning this assessment task to real-world, industry application. As teacher education students move into the workforce they will be expected to talk through their understanding and process of making pedagogical decisions, either in job interviews, parent teacher meetings and on-going professional development. Course teaching staff set up the final assessment task with the view to support students even after they have completed the course.

The course coordinator reached out to AccessAbility proactively to ensure that the assessment could be completed by all students and understand what accommodations might need to made. The course coordinator also proactively reached out to students that had indicated that they had a Reasonable Adjustment Plan (RAP) to ensure all students felt supported and comfortable.

The course coordinator booked small meeting rooms/classrooms for that last week of semester using the room booking feature, using either the Web Room Booking System or Outlook depending on location. These rooms were then allocated to tutors for completion of the interactive oral examination.

Tutors were provided with step-by-step instructions on how to create booking using Office 365 Bookings. The bookings were set up in 15 minute intervals to give tutors/markers enough time to greet the student, run through the interactive oral protocol.

This included checking the student ID and if there are any RAP considerations and set up Zoom recording and converse with the student. Following permission being granted from the student, an audio recording of the interactive oral was captured via Zoom to ensure that that it would be possible to review students’ work after the event, for moderation, in the case that a mark goes missing or if a student challenges their mark

The 15-minute interval also included marking and wrap up time.

Thank you to Dr Erika Spray from the School of Education who provided her time, expertise and instructions to help with the creation of this resource.

If you have an example of redesigning assessment to improve security that you would like to share with colleagues, please contact LDTI@newcastle.edu.au