Cultivating student teachers' capability for collaborative problem-solving in curriculum and assessment planning through communities of inquiry

This project will develop student teachers’ capacity for collaborative problem-solving in two core courses on curriculum and assessment in BEd and PGDE programmes: TLS3003 and CUI5046. These two core courses enroll about 1,000 – 1,100 students each academic year. This project will involve about 280 students in three experimental class groups (~140 students) and three control class groups (~140 students). Small groups (4-6 students in each group) will be engaged in iterative collaborative problem-solving cycles to tackle problems in curriculum and assessment planning (See Figure 1 on Page 5). First, students will conduct regular online group discussions on Moodle to formulate solutions to problems of curriculum and assessment planning using text-based or multimedia materials. They will then test and consolidate solutions by (a) creating new curriculum / assessment plans, and (b) proposing implementation guidelines. Subsequently, students will share their plans in a whole-class social space on Google Sites (or Google Classroom) for peer-critique. Finally, students will showcase and justify two selected curriculum/assessment plans (revised by using peer groups’ critiques) during face-to-face in-class discussions. Through in-group and inter-group collaborations (De Hei, Strijbos, Sjoer, & Admiraal, 2016; Johnson & Johnson, 2009), students will be afforded a supportive community of inquiry (Garrison, 2016) in which they support one another’s productive learning. Project evaluation will be conducted using pre-and post-test surveys and focus groups.