Summative co-assessment: A deep learning approach to enhancing employability skills and attributes

Abstract

Service-learning is a pedagogy that combines academic study with service to the community. Voluntary work placements are integral to service-learning and offer students an ideal opportunity to develop their employability skills and attributes. In a service-learning course, it was considered good practice to raise students’ awareness of the development of these skills and attributes. To enable this, the assessment in the course was adapted accordingly, and thus an innovative, summatively co-assessed oral presentation was introduced. This study investigates the effects of using this type of assessment, in which students were required to give an oral presentation of their critical reflections on the employability skills and attributes they had developed during the course. This practitioner research study was a small project using qualitative semi-structured interviews and a focus group with students engaged in service-learning. Although this study uses service-learning pedagogy as its basis, the concept and practice of summative co-assessment is transferable to other academic courses.