H.A.S.T.E.

Holistic Assessment Through Student-Teacher Engagement

A case study on collaborative learning and pedagogy
The average undergraduate student is concerned with professor feedback only insofar as
it relates to grades, which in turn rate the students mastery of content and form within a
specific course. Students will often use instructor feedback1 to make whatever
improvements are necessary to achieve higher marks on course-specific projects;
however, it is more difficult for them to apply content-specific criticism to the broader
skillsets that will follow them beyond that class into other classrooms, and later into their
careers and adult personal lives. Success outside the class-specific assignment is largely
contingent upon a students ability to see the bigger pictureto correlate a challenge or
shortcoming from an assessment with a learning intelligence. Correlation only comes
through the students self-reflection, motivation to learn and improve, and ability to
monitor her future work to track progress and mend the shortcoming. Furthermore,
students will identify these connections only through robust interaction with their faculty.
Therefore, rather than focus exclusively on formative, micro-feedback in a single
assignment, faculty should devote more time to assessing those broader skillsets, or what
we might call learning intelligences or transcompetencies. As several studies show,
holistic feedback is more important than formative feedback for building the foundational
elements of lifelong learning: self-direction, self-monitoring, self-regulation, and selfmotivation. When an instructor invites communication with the student, she is promoting
these elements, and enabling the student to participate in deciphering the goals,
objectives and feedback (Nicol, MacFarlane-Dick, 352). When feedback moves beyond
content competence or domain-specific knowledge to focus instead on transcomptencies,2
students are better able to adapt their knowledge in different contexts (education, work)
and roles (student, peer reviewer, leader) (Wilde, Mdritscher, Siguardson 127).
Imagine a scenario in which Janine, a freshman English major, is enrolled in
Shakespeare, Biology 101, Calculus, French II, and World History. Janine excels in
writing, but in college will now begin to master the skill of conducting intensive
academic research for her papers; she generally earns As in writing-intensive courses
with little effort required. However, Janine struggles in her Shakespeare course: she can
no longer earn As with an articulate vocabulary or intuitive reflection of the literature; the
professor notes that Janines research is too broad and she doesnt posit a logical thesis
that finds patterns in Shakespeares plays through a close reading of the texts. Janine is
also struggling in her math and sciences courses in spite of tutoring and devoting a large
number of hours to studying and completing assignments. Traditionally, Janines
challenges in these courses are blamed on: not knowing how to do advanced research, not
understanding the teacher, not seeing the value of STEM for her career goals, and not
knowing where to find a good support system beyond a paid tutor. The formative
1 Note that several studies listed in the Bibliography discovered that students will not read or learn from
feedback that is granular unless revisions and additional points are offered.
2 Graham Cheetham and G.E. Chivers define transcompetency in the workplace as a competency that
spans other competencies, enhancing and mediating them (109).

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feedback provided in her courses indicates that Janine is missing points because she is
making sloppy errors, but does not indicate how to prevent these errors. If the five
professors offered holistic feedback (holistic both within the course AND as a
transdisciplinary team), Janine and the faculty would (together) identify the underlying
competency challenge: Janine struggles with Logical-Mathematical intelligenceto
think conceptually, abstractly, and to be able to see and explore patterns and
relationships. Whether she becomes an English Professor, a CEO for an education
company, or the Nobel Laureate for Literature, Janine will need to master logicalmathematical skills for project management, leadership, and identifying new and unique
topics.
Now imagine a possible intervention for Janines situation: Through a student-teacher
platform, the faculty collective will provide course-specific feedback that is combined
and made visible to all five faculty and Janine in a single place. This will lead to a holistic
assessment of Janines skills; together, the faculty and Janine will discern that Janine
could benefit from a customized assignment that will focus on logical-mathematical skills
and also meet the content criteria for her five courses:
Identify and explore patterns in three Shakespeare plays that examine the
biological sciences during the Elizabethan Era. Present these patterns in
a 3-page paper that incorporates a data visualization, and use Weka to
identify the percentage of other plays that will contain these same
patterns.
Janine is relieved to invest all of her energy into one high-stakes assignment that will be
assessed by four of her teachers with a rubric that focuses on logical-mathematical
competency, rather than dilute her efforts to complete four different assignments that
focus on different learning intelligences. She is thrilled that her professors are committed
to helping her improve a skill that is integral to her success in advanced coursework and
her future profession rather than have her complete yet another long paper on which she
will inevitably score well but learn little beyond the domain-specific content (and she is a
scholar of Victorian Poetry, so Shakespeare will matter little in her area of specialization).
The faculty acknowledge that technical material is largely useless unless one can
communicate it effectively (Pappas 3), and that success in a students career will be
largely dependent on an employees ability to identify patterns and communicate those
patterns logically and clearly with her team. At the semesters end, Janine and her five
faculty members revisit the holistic feedback to discuss progress between the initial
evaluation and the end-of-term, customized, transcompetent project. All faculty finish the
term satisfied that the student has mastered domain-specific content and, more
importantly, that she has improved a real-world skill that will contribute to her success.
Janine is motivated to continue identify patterns and making logical arguments on her
own; she now reads and writes in her humanities courses with newfound passion and
interdisciplinary focus, sees value in careful research and close reading, and is better able
to monitor her performance in courses that will require logical-mathematical intelligence.

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H.A.S.T.E. will work as a collective assessment platform through which:

A) Class-specific feedback is recorded and made visible to the entire collective.
The feedback might focus on domain-specific knowledge, issues with
research, presentation, plagiarism, interpersonal skills, and transcompetencies.
The system will then gather the input and identify the most common skill(s)
that require work (or alternatively, perhaps create a list of competencies that
faculty will select, to ensure that correlations are discovered).
B) The faculty and student try to look at the broader picture to determine how
the challenge skill(s) could be improved through an interdisciplinary project.
The project is then custom-designed as a team, and a new rubric developed to
evaluate that project. The project will replace an assessment of equal value
across each of the courses.
C) The group will evaluate the students progress pre- and post-assessment, and
make suggestions to continue working on the transcompetency in future
coursework and in her career path.
Concerns with student privacy: Students may feel uncomfortable being scrutinized under
a collective microscope. Perhaps the student does not want a challenge to be identified in
a course where she excels or needs little work, or perhaps she doesnt want a faculty
member in her discipline to know that she struggles heavily with coursework in a
different discipline. Perhaps she is worried that collective feedback will somehow bias
grading in the other courses.

Courses where this might work well:

Yale Scholars Program

A cohort course like Year 1000 (taught fall 2014 by Anders Winroth, Valerie
Hensen, and Mary Miller)

Bibliography
Boud, D. Sustainable Assessment: Rethinking Assessment for the Learning Society.
Studies in Continuing Education 22.4 (2000): 413426.
Cheetham, Graham and G.E. Chivers. Professions, Competence, and Informal Learning.
Massachussetts: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2005.
Duffy, F. D., and E.S. Holmboe. Self Assessment in Lifelong Learning and Improving
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Performance in Practice. Journal of the American Medical Association 296 (2006):

11371139.
Wilde, Mdritscher, and Siguardson.Mashup Personal Learning Environments.
Chapter 5. Magoulas, George, ed. E-Infrastructures and Technologies for Lifelong
Learning. London: IGI Global, 2011.
Miller, Ronald and Barbara Olds. Using Holistic Grading to Evaluate Writing in
Engineering Classes. Retrieved from
http://www.modelsandmodeling.net/Publications_files/ASEE-97-Ron%20and
%20Barbara%20-%20holistic%20grading.pdf.
Nicol, D., and D. Macfarlane-Dick. Formative Assessment and Self-regulated Learning:
A Model and Seven Principles of Good Feedback Practice. Studies in Higher
Education 31.2 (2006): 199218.
Pappas, Eric and Robert Hendricks. Holistic Grading in Science and Engineering.
Journal of Engineering Education 89.4 (Oct 2000): 403-08.
Rae, A and D Cochrane. Listening to Students. How to Make Written Assessment
Feedback Useful. Active Learning in Higher Education 9.3 (2008): 217-30.
Roselli, R and S Brophy. Experiences with Formative Assessment in Engineering
Classrooms. Journal of Engineering Education 95 (Oct 2006): 325-33.
Sheppard, Ken. Two Feedback Types: Do They Make a Difference. RELC 23.1 (June
1992): 103-110.
Winters, K and R Streveler. How Student-Faculty Interactions Influence Student
Motivations: A Longitudinal Study Using Self-Determination Theory. Proceedings of
the American Society for Engineering Education 2010 Annual Conference, Session AC
2010-1107.

See also learning projects such as ROLE, TENcompetence, LTfLL, and Luisa

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