Day 6

A bad day - I've felt like absolute trash since last night actually...which is not good for getting things done on a day that you are fortuitous enough to have blocked out in your diary for a research day. So another day worth of email has piled up and I'm still somewhat ill. Also, ARC Discovery Project outcomes were released today - the application I was on with Kunle Oloyede (from Engineering) and a few others was unsuccessful :-(  Then I realised that the submission due date for one of the conferences I am attending in March was TODAY!!!! Argh...

So I whipped up a quick 4 pager proposal: "Towards a classification of criterion referenced assessment models in mathematics courses - student and academic perspectives". Jen Flegg is on as co-author of course for her work with the survey design, and presumably some help in the future with drafting and proofing the final paper ;-)

Some things to note for the future here:

1. Keep track of the due dates of proposals!!!
2. Education conferences require much longer "proposals" than the abstracts I am familiar with for maths conferences. So far I've done a 3 pager and a 4 pager.

Also, yes I realise that this sounds a lot like what I talked about at QANZIAM. But it's more subtle than that. My thinking is that the whole criterion referenced assessment experiment thing that I ran this semester has a few prongs:

• there's just the idea of CRA in a maths course and how it is perceived by students
• there's the comparison of this across two courses (namely, PDEs and DEs, but anything really)
• and there's developing different models of how to implement CRA for mathematics courses.

The last one of these is what I'm really getting at in this conference paper.  I think that there are different ways to interpret the idea of a "criterion" and thus for designing its associated "standards". If you put some thought into it, these can be used to really reflect to a student what you believe in as being important in a mathematical response to a question/problem, thereby providing them with a better chance of doing what is required (by the discipline expert) and of course, getting the best mark.

Well, it's in now...but scrappy of course, so fingers crossed that it's accepted.