Of the many assessment tasks I have developed, I’ve found that scaffolded assessment tasks introduce the students to a community of practice and develop their transferable skills. In the second-year course PHAR2011, Introductory Pharmacology and Toxicology, the final product of such a scaffolded assessment task was a commentary article. This assignment reflects the professional practice of a pharmacologist who has been asked to write a commentary on a soon-to-be-published research article. Notes on the topic of the paper are taken, a commentary is written, it is submitted to the journal editor and peer-reviewed, the feedback from the review is incorporated into the final submission and a “reflection” on how the comments from the peer review have been addressed is written. This assignment allows the students to develop many skills, including analysis and evaluation of information, professional writing skills, and importance of drafts and editing in writing, performing peer review, providing critical feedback constructively, responding to critical feedback, and reflective practice. Self-evaluation by the students, by comparing their work against the evaluation criteria, is a critical skill that can result in significant improvement in learning achievements; this skill does not come easily to many students. By creating a peer-review exercise, the students are required to evaluate the work of their colleagues against the assessment criteria. However, students often do not engage with peer review activities, they see it as not their “job” or don’t feel confident they can do it well or are concerned that they will be disadvantaged by a poor peer review. However, when I presented the peer-review exercise in terms of a lifelong professional skill that they will be using, I noticed a significant increase in student engagement in this part of the task. We observed that the students took on board the comments provided by their peers and improved their final product. This process was facilitated by grading rubrics that aligned with the learning objectives and provided the students with a guideline of what was expected for each stage of the assessment task. 

To help the students to develop the skills they needed to complete this task I developed tutorial activities in peer reviewing and receiving and responding to feedback. These activities allowed the students to practice and develop their skills in providing specific, constructive & balanced feedback. As most of the students have not had the opportunity to this point to respond to feedback and to improve a piece of writing based on feedback (close the loop), the second tutorial allowed the students to practice these skills as well as let them know this is part of a scientist’s professional life.

Reflecting on a couple of iterations of this scaffolded task, it was clear that some students were struggling to synthesise information from several sources into a cohesive paragraph. To help them develop these skills I developed an online module that helped develop skills in note-making, identifying themes and synthesising the information gained from the research literature on each topic into paragraphs. 

We have observed that this scaffold task, and its associated online modules and tutorials, has improved the quality of the students’ writing.