Pair Assessment with Coach and Expert Feedback

The assessment of the project has been conducted for three years with good feedback from the students. Autumn 2024 was the first year that the project was split into two parts. The feedback was predominantly positive.

The project provides an open topic, in which the students have to formulate their own geographical question to be answered. It gives students the freedom to pursue their own interests while using the knowledge they have acquired during the semester to look at the world from a geographical perspective. Besides practical formulation, the project guides them into a practical application of the basic concepts, providing the opportunity to explore real-world problems and common challenges such as data acquisition and preparation. Students are made aware of the effort and time involved in data acquisition, which is often underestimated. These insights, gained under supervision, are very valuable for later Bachelor’s and Master’s thesis and for their future endeavors.

The coaching throughout the project allows space to discuss ideas and to make sure there is continuous progress. Since the project is only conceptual, we can really evaluate if the basic concepts are understood and where more support is needed, without focusing too much on the technical skills which are evaluated in the exercise quizzes.

Although the overall outcome has been very positive so far, and the projects show very creative ideas on spatial issues. There are usually 1-2 projects per semester that do not meet the expectations. These groups have the chance to revise the project after feedback.

We realized that our feedback at the end of the project did not have much impact on the students’ learning, either because their minds were already in the next challenge or because there was no actual application of the feedback given. By splitting the project into two parts and giving the first feedback after the first part and discussing it in class, the feedback is well received and often applied in the second part of the project, making the understanding of the concepts much more effective.

We knew from the beginning that we wanted the project to have an open topic, so that students could apply the content of the course to their own interests and have a higher engagement. However, this brought a number of challenges, as we needed to make sure that the assessment was fair and that the feedback involved still a manageable amount of work. The solution found was to create a pre-structured Word document that provides the structure for the project and also works as a guide for their process. Inevitably, this document took a lot of thought and effort to make it easy to correct, fair to evaluate and yet a guideline for a wide range of topics.

Over time, we have noticed that the course has a lower priority because it is not graded. This does not necessarily mean that students are not interested in the course, because we do feel there is an engagement and even interest in pursuing further work (e.g. Bachelors’ and Masters’ theses) in Geographic Information Systems (GIS). And although GIS is currently an elective course, our previous students point out that GIS is one of the most used skills after graduation. However, between a graded course and an ungraded course, the ungraded course often gets less attention simply because the amount of effort invested past a certain point does not make a difference in their outcome in terms of grades. This is a paradigm that we have observed over the last few years, and it is the reason why we are planning to introduce grading of the project work. Additionally, because of changing the course into a graded version, we are currently discussing whether to replace part 2 of the project work with an exam in which students must apply their theoretical knowledge by interpreting practical exercises. This would ensure that the evaluation (grade) is fair for all students and that the learning objectives are achieved by each student individually.

We are also planning to make our content even more competence-based, and to that end we will be making adjustments to the lecture material in particular.

The project involves a lot of effort and given the resources available, the project must be carried out in groups of two. We recommend dividing the students into groups as soon as it is clear who will definitely be participating in the course. In the past, we have let students create their own groups, but this often leads to discussion. So just be clear from the beginning to give them space to organize their schedules.

Another tip we can give is to create conceptual projects if possible. This takes the focus off the outcome and puts it on the process. While it can sound strange that the result is not the deciding factor in the end, it adds a lot of value from the pedagogical side. Having a guided process organized in this way takes the stress off the software application of the workflow and ensures that the students think through their solution and organize their data structure in a logical way, which is very valuable for their future work.