Designing and using a Patchwork Text to assess social work students undertaking a module in family therapy

The Patchwork Text is an assessment strategy whereby students produce and share pieces of work during their programme. They then use these pieces as the basis of a final integrated text. This paper reports on the experience of using this strategy in a modular course structure. The idea was to try to provide formative feedback for the students who traditionally complain that all the assessment occurs at the end of the module. A surprising side-effect of the process was that students were clearly studying earlier in the module which improved the knowledge base of the classroom discussions.