Coping Cycle and its importance when designing an Assessment: Reflections on the Learning Process

Abstract

Live student projects in a Higher Education (hereinafter HE) setting are vital in business education as they allow for a practice-based and holistic development of employability skills. This empirical paper illustrates how the assessment design and regime may affect student engagement and learning in live student projects. The approach advocated encompasses the conduct of projects that take advantage of a simple principle in learning, the utilization of the coping cycle as a means for double loop learning. The data used as evidence in this work focus on the project teams’ Facebook conversations. The descriptive statistics and the qualitative data provide an empirical basis for the claim that assessment design leads to a particular kind of learning and emotional journey for the students and in this case potentially facilitating double-loop, deeper learning. The findings can inform HE academics and teaching practitioners who are developing educational student-run projects and can provide insights for educational pedagogy