GREATER THAN THE SUM OF THE PARTS: DISTRIBUTED INTELLIGENCE IN ASSESSMENT DESIGN

One of the challenges for teachers in the information age is keeping up with the broader changes in society for which we are preparing our students. For language teachers working in different cultural contexts, this can be particularly challenging. One way to manage the complexities inherent in producing relevant tasks for students from different social contexts from our own, is through distributed intelligence.

In this presentation, I will describe the development of an interdisciplinary group interview task in a Professional Communications in English course at a university in Istanbul. Because the course involves preparing faculty students for internship and job applications, it is essential that the content and tasks are practical, relevant and appropriate for the social context. However, as a non Turk who is comparatively unfamiliar with the Turkish business context in general, and Turkish recruitment processes in particular, this represented a significant challenge. My response to this was to use the distributed intelligence at my disposal. The task was developed in collaboration with a number of people, all with different perspectives, experience and specialist knowledge, including a recruitment specialist, current and past students, and EFL curriculum and assessment specialists.

In the presentation I will describe the design, development and implementation of the group interview task, and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using distributed intelligence in this way. The challenges of designing a group assessment task for an interdisciplinary group of students will also be discussed.