[Interviewer] It's really good of you to
agreeing to be interviewed.
And I want to ask you about standards,
especially students' understanding of standards.
I guess my big question is why do students
need to understand standards?
- Well there are two fundamental reasons
which I think are obvious ones that are stated.
The first one is that students can hardly be
expected to monitor and control
the quality of their own work which they're producing
unless they know what quality looks like at the end.
So that has to be something which they know about
so their own work can head towards fine quality.
So that's fundamental.
The other thing is that
if students don't know about quality
they're now relying on us as teachers
whether it is at primary school or at university
they're relying on us
to make decisions based on standards.
Now we try to convey those standards in different ways
but students really shouldn't have to believe us
unless there are good grounds for believing us.
They need to know what the standards are as well.
- [Interviewer] So how do you go about helping them
to understand those standards?
Surely that's a lifelong undertaking for academic staff.
- Well it is except that
many academics don't have
as clear a view of standards as you might think.
For example, many collections of student works,
the comparisons that are made
as an academic reads through
all the students' scripts,
let's say it's written work,
they recognise this is much better than this
is much better than this
is much better than that.
So in other words,
when they present it with concrete cases,
they can differentiate them in terms of quality
but if you ask them in advance
what would a high quality thing look like
or can you construct one that is of high quality
they'd have to do a lot of thinking about it.
So in other words they know intuitively
they can make judgments in terms of comparisons
but in terms of absolute judgment
they can't really do a very good job
and they start immersed in it
and what I say is that if we are educating people
at university for professional careers down the track
then we are obliged -
we have an ethical obligation to them
to introduce them, induct them into knowing
what those standards are
because when they go out to work as professionals,
some of them will be working with people
who aren't colleagues.
They might be the only person of those skills
in the company or in the organisation
so they've got to know what quality is
from the beginning.
They can't rely on teachers saying that
and there's no rubrics out there.
- [Interviewer] But can I really expect my students
to have the same understanding of standards
that I have painstakingly acquired over many years?
- Not the same depth of it
but you can expect them
to have made enough of a start on that path
so that they are able to
without being wrong much
that what the quality of their own work is.
Many students submit work for assessment
and they haven't got a clue
whether it's really any good or not.
They might think it is.
They judge that sometimes by
how much work they've put in.
But they don't know enough about the actual quality.
We have to get students into the practise of
making judgments themselves from Year One
about the kinds of work
they have to produce themselves.
Now where's that work gonna be found?
It's going to be found from other students.
It is what other students do.
They have to start making judgment
about the quality of that
and they too can start to learn to differentiate quality.
Now I'm talking about quality as though its unitary
but quality itself can be decomposed
not to make the judgment
but to explain and justify the judgment.
So that is really the fundamental point at which
I differ with most of the thinking that is going on today.
People said to me in universities
about when can you introduce this to students,
when they're in third year or fourth year of a degree?
I'd say no, in Year One.
They might not have come across this much at school
but they have to start learning
and they're more able to make good judgments
than what we give them credit for.
- [Interviewer] Why isn't it enough to just give them
model answers?
- When you give them model answers
you've chosen those answers.
I would prefer to throw them in at the deep end
and say, have a look at these.
What do you think of them?
How good are they?
Now students then have to start looking at them
from a very different frame of mind.
They're not looking at them to see
whether they're models or not.
They're not looking at your explanations of them
and if you give them model answers
chances are they will be able to pick
or you'll be telling them
these are really good ones.
Yours isn't like that
or yours needs to be like that.
But students need to see the whole range of quality
and how it's expressed in reality
in order to understand the concept of quality.
That's how we understand
a whole lot of everyday concepts.
We learn by experience with differentiated objects
and we start to classify them.
So it's not hard and fast rules.
- [Interviewer] Let's say I go down that road,
I'm not gonna find that my students are gonna be
challenging my judgment all the time
and saying, well we know about these standards too
and we think this deserves a better grade
than the one you've given me.
- That's a fear that I think is
not too difficult to basically allay.
Students pretty soon get to understand
that your quality, your idea of quality and standards
is in fact the one that
they have to actually agree with.
And when I say standards
standards have to go beyond
a single class and a single course.
Academics have to get together
to look at work from different courses
and say, these are about the same quality.
They're all high quality and these are not.
- [Interviewer] If you're in favour of the process
of making those judgments about academic standards
opening that up to students,
so they're doing as well as us,
what about feedback?
Do you believe that peer feedback
has any sort of role to play?
- Well there is a risk in peer feedback that
students could be basically exchanging
faulty or different ideas about what the standards are.
So for example if a Student A actually
hasn't really thought about standards and
doesn't really care for that idea
and another student is really quite cluey
on the gradation,
then those two are not gonna have
a lot to say to each other.
There's a sort of calibration or tuning
that students have to have
so they end up having roughly the same idea of
what high quality work looks like
and what barely adequate work looks like
as the teacher does.
And that teacher design as in other courses.
- [Interviewer] So is it also an implication then that
you can't produce work of a high standard unless
you understand what the high standards are?
- You might, by a chance.
Dr. Lily Min ZengAssistant Professor (course designer)
Tracy, Xiaoping ZouDr.
