Reflections on Assessment 1 for Inquiry Project

My assessment of understanding involves a recent high school graduate and her understanding of photography after having taken a class in the subject. I attempted to look for signs of metacognition, transactional strategies, reciprocal teaching as well as a cognitive approach or a social constructivist approach. I also tried to incorporate questions that touched on Dewey’s sense of “experience”. I started with the question, “What was the main concept you learned in in photography? Was it more technical, i.e. how to use a camera, or philosophical, like what makes a good subject, or a mix of both?” What I found was that at this level of study a more basic and technical approach is taken to photography, an understanding of how to, but not why. This lead me to questions of the history of the camera and it’s evolution, the subject noted that there wasn’t much history provided in the class. This also prompted me to ask what kind of cameras were being used. The subject informed me that, “The school had about 15 cameras that we could check out for the night or weekend... if we had our own manual camera we were allowed to use it.” This lead me to ask a follow up question for my second assessment regarding how this limitation effected the subject ability to fully understand photography in today’s world. I had touched on this subject in my first series of questions asking if her “new greater understanding of photography” helped her to understand better the processes of professional photography. Her response was generally yes in regards to the technical process involved in a manual camera photo shoot. Based on the response given, I felt to get an answer, closer to what I was asking, I had to be more specific about the digital aspect of photography. I also tried to investigate the subjects understanding of relatedness or transferability. I tried to get a feel for the subjects understanding of photography’s importance in other subject matters. The subject responded that that was not taught in the class, I then for my second set of questions tried to reword a question to ask more specifically what the subject knew of the interrelatedness of the subjects despite what was taught in class. I was also interested on what kind of self reflection was occurring, and how it happened; was it suggested by a teacher or was their a group dynamic involving other students and their ideas. The self reflection it turned out was internally diagnosing what you found out “worked well”, as well as what you would do “differently” next time. In respect to Dewey I asked “When learning photography did you experience a sense of anticipation or excitement about learning the the process of photography? Did it lead you to do research on your own about the subject?” The subject responded overwhelmingly that she had been excited to learn each step of the process and anticipated the final outcome of the photo taking, developing and print making process. She claimed it inspired her to try different things with the camera. I felt overall that the subject had a good working knowledge of how to take a picture. I felt she was at the intermediate level of understanding in that respect. I make this assessment with some hesitation as there wasn’t any digital camera lessons taught, however, I feel confident in my assessment because with the digital age surrounding us often it is the fundamental process that is forgotten. My second set of questions tried to use this series of questions and answers as a base to then learn how the parameters of this class effected the subjects actions in and understanding of photography.