ABSTRACT
Student evaluation of a multimedia authoring project has two distinct purposes. The first is to make the students reflect on the process they have gone through in creating the multimedia presentation or website, and to take time to consider what they have learned from it. Younger students may describe the process, what they did and what they produced; older students should interpret and analyse the use of multimedia authoring in their learning and evaluate the end product against specific criteria. It is important that the students’ evaluation leads them towards thinking about how they would improve the process next time, which should contribute to developing their understanding, raising standards and possibly developing new criteria for evaluation. The second purpose of student evaluation is to help the teacher with individual assessment. Teachers will assess the process and the product (as described in Chapter 12). However the project’s outcome will be a group product where each individual’s work will be an indivisible part of the whole. One student may have drawn a picture on one screen, collaborated on text for another and recorded sound for a third. Apart from it being difficult to pick out an individual’s contribution, it would not be useful because collaboration may have been an important aspect of the quality of that student’s work. Indeed, if students get a sense that they will be evaluated by the individual elements they produce in the final piece, this may set up a sense of competition which would be very unhelpful in terms of working as a group. The students’ own evaluations of what they did as part of a group and how they contributed to it, as well as how they considered other aspects of the project, will give the teacher insight into each individual’s understanding of the process.
