METODOLOGÍA PARA LA EVALUACIÓN DEL RIESGO DE LIQUIDEZ

The first painting I chose was Coffee (1915) and this has been used to explore the theme ‘conceptions of assessment’.

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Figure 39. Coffee (Pierre Bonnard, 1915)

This painting was chosen firstly because many participants brought coffee as one of their artefacts but also because of the composition that

Bonnard has used in this work. Bonnard succeeds in making the viewer feel part of a normal or routine event but yet, at the same time, separate to it which echoes with my experiences as an observer on participants’ assessment practices. Assessments in HE are a normal and routine event and by participants sharing their reflections with me, I felt part of it, but at the same time separate to their experiences.

This idea of being part of but yet separate to something also echoes with the finding that participants appear to conceive assessments as end of semester examinations; a routine event but separate to their learning rather than part of it. As described in Chapter 4.2, Peter used different study strategies before end of semester exams compared to coursework assessments and only used his desk when studying for these. Emily described end of semester exams as her main goal while learning and

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pictured herself sitting the exam; ‘it’s really hard to picture yourself

sitting in that exam when you have no idea of what the module or … how everything fits in together until half way through then that’s when I finally see it’.

In the MPharm curriculum at the time these interviews took place,

traditional end of semester examinations were used in years one to three but were also balanced with other types of assessment which in many cases contributed as much to the final module grade as the examination. When questioned about what they understood by the term assessment, participants appeared to conceive of assessment as the end of semester exams, viewing these as more important to them in terms of

performance than those that take place throughout semester. For example, when asked what his understanding was of assessment in the curriculum, Dave said ‘assessments, as in like the actual exam?’. The MPharm curriculum is designed as a progression, with assessments intended to move students along the journey however participants did not perceive assessments in that way. They appeared to conceive them as events in and of themselves, as intense moments in their journey, creating a break (or punctuation) in their learning. Participants gave the impression of assessments as ‘hurdles to cross’ rather than as an integral part of their learning process. Returning to Ingold’s (2011) ideas, he describes what Heidegger has to say about the way that human beings and non-human animals relate to the world around them and discusses how:

to the skilled practitioner absorbed in an activity, the things he uses are available and ready to hand. So long as activity flows

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smoothly, their objectiveness melts into the flow. As the

practitioner’s awareness becomes one with the activity, he or she does not attend to the objects as such (Ingold 2011 p.81).

If we consider assessments as objects in the meshwork of students’ learning, participants’ experiences imply that these do not ‘melt into the

flow’ in the way that Ingold describes. Returning to Bonnard’s coffee, he

draws attention to this moment captured over a cup of coffee and portrays this ordinary event as an intense moment because of his dramatic use of colour and unusual composition, similar to how participants viewed assessments within their learning.

Crossman (2007) in a qualitative analysis of the role of relationships and emotions in student perceptions of learning and assessment describes how past experiences of assessment influences current perceptions (p.318) and this would appear to echo with participants’ experiences in this study. Their emphasis on written exams in their past experience (perhaps through the assessment driven culture in secondary school education) may be leading them to over-emphasise the importance of exams. This conception of assessment as the end of semester exam also appears to have an impact on participants views on feedback which will be discuss in 5.5 below.

In Coffee, as indicated earlier, Bonnard challenges convention in the way he composes the painting by not adhering to traditional rules of

perspective and by framing the picture in an unusual way. Part of one of the subjects is ‘cut off’ and the table and the items on the table form the main foreground rather than the people. As in Chapter 4.2 and Law’s

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(2009) collateral realities, Bonnard draws attention to the normally un- noticed aspects of the moment. By comparing participants’ assessment practices to this painting in the same way, what is normally in the background (their conceptions of assessment) has been brought to the foreground. In the spirit of Bonnard’s challenge to the convention of composition, in designing assessment for the MPharm curriculum, a similar challenge to convention is worth considering. A growing emphasis on innovative assessment methods which are being introduced to assess skills as well as knowledge (see Chapter 1.2.3) appear to challenge students to learn for understanding and to develop as professionals. An issue that appears to need to be engaged with however is students’ fundamental conception of the important assessment as being the end of semester written examination.