The role of knowledge visualisation in supporting postgraduate dissertation assessment

Abstract

The worldwide increase in the number of postgraduate students has led to an ever-increasing workload. This puts pressure on supervisors to maintain high standards of consistency, accuracy and fairness. This is especially true in developing countries where the increase is supervision capacity is not on a par with the growth in student numbers.The aim of this research is to deploy freely available technology in order to find a way to help examiners to cope with this extra pressure, while maintaining the rigour of the assessment process.In terms of methodology, we commenced by mining the literature to ascertain exactly what criteria dissertation examiners were assessing, and how they went about doing this. We discovered that examiners tend first to gain an initial impression of a dissertation by reading the summary sections of the report: the abstract, introduction and conclusion. This delivers a helpful overview that eases the subsequent thorough examination of the dissertation, where they work their way through each chapter. This "overview then zoom" practice is reminiscent of the primary information visualisation mantra. This led us to consider whether knowledge visualisation could be the ameliorative mechanism we were looking for.We then carried out a systematic literature review in order to determine whether knowledge visualisation had been used in this context. This revealed a surprising lack of research on the use of knowledge visualisation for assessment. We thus commenced to study extant use of visualisations. A case study approach was employed to study extant use of visualisations, in terms of how adequately they provided evidence of students having satisfied the previously identified assessment criteria. A number of experienced supervisors were then surveyed to gather their opinions about the role of knowledge visualisations in dissertations.Our findings indicate that knowledge visualisations can indeed provide evidence that particular criteria have been satisfied within a dissertation, and they do this more efficiently than text. Given the advances in technology, all postgraduate students are now able easily to produce computer-generated visualisations, so requiring their inclusion would be no great impediment.We conclude that knowledge visualisations demonstrate promise in terms of supporting assessment of postgraduate dissertations.Our recommendations are that the deliberate deployment of knowledge visualisations in this context be investigated further to determine whether this initial promise can be realised in actual practice.

Group Spinner

“…In addition to visualizations being powerful tools to enhance communication [6,40], there was a recognition of the fact that the indicators provided a useful language to communicate with students about their learning. However, there was some concern about the need/time required to 'train' students in this language.…”

Multidimensional Quality Evaluation of Graduate Thesis: Based on the Probabilistic Linguistic MABAC Method

“…The personal ability and the quality of the tutor are also related to the level of graduates' learning achievement[9]. However, in developing countries, the growth in the supervisory capacity of tutors has not kept pace with the growth in the number of students[10]. Several tutors have outdated personal knowledge, lax requirements for students, poor guidance, and inadequate responsibilities.…”