Designing exemplars for multimodal group projects in an undergraduate English course

Exemplars have been used as an educational tool to allow students to understand assessment standards. Recent research has indicated that when exemplars are effectively used with other pedagogical strategies such as rubrics, peer- or self- evaluation, not only does students’ academic performance improve, but students’ academic self-efficacy is also enhanced (e.g. Dixon et al., 2020; Hawe et al., 2019; To et al., 2021). In the presentation, the authors will first discuss the development process of the exemplars, including video productions, posters and photo essays, for multimodal group projects in an undergraduate English course, which takes into consideration the group projects produced by students and the feedback elicited from students and teachers in the pilot study. Afterwards, the presentation will cover the design of the related assignments (e.g. project proposals, reflective group presentations, peer evaluations, and student-teacher consultations) that aim to motivate students, promote self-monitoring and self-regulation, as well as enhance self-efficacy among students. Finally, the authors will share some insights (e.g. students’ originality was not affected, as reported in Hendry and Tomitsch, 2014) and the challenges faced when designing the exemplars, which were included in the course launched in AY2023-24.