Functional Areas of a Business - Improving Your Assessment Skills
An important part of your course will be learning how to assess. Assessment is about making judgments - it is not just expressing your own opinion but also making sure that you have some evidence to support this opinion. An important part of this process is developing an argument.
This exercise is designed to help you understand how to develop an argument. An argument has more than one side to it. This means that there is a need to see things from different perspectives (viewpoints) and to try to weigh up how important those viewpoints might be in relation to the question.
Talking Heads
This is an activity for you to work on in pairs. Label yourselves 'number 1' and 'number 2'.
- Number 1 will be given a statement, which will be read out, to your partner.
- Number 2 will then try to offer an argument against the point Number 1 has just given.
- Number 1 will then respond and so on. See if you can continue your 'argument' for five minutes.
- It might be useful to record your argument so you can listen back to what you have both said and then think about the 'quality' of your argument.
Image: "I am a zebra with black stripes on a white background." "No you're not - you have white stripes on a black background!" Arguments allow you to go in different ways and look at things from different perspectives - how will you argue your case? Copyright: Tim & Annette, stock.xchng
Let's take a simple example to illustrate this:
 |
|
 |
|
|
| |
Notts County are the best football team in the country. |
 |
|
 |
| |
I think that you will find that this is not the case - after all they are in League 2 and if they were the best then they would be at least in the Premiership. |
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
| |
Perhaps so, but that depends on your definition of 'best'. I am basing that definition on the length of time the club have survived. |
|
 |
|
| |
But surely 'best' means winning something and Notts County have not won anything for a long time. |
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
Not true - they have won various titles since 1971 and have been in what was the First Division so they have had plenty of success. |
|
|
|
| |
|
|
 |
 |
|
|
And so on! Hopefully this gives you some ideas to start. Now start to develop your arguments about the following three different statements:
 |
|
|
|
|
Good communications are the most important aspect of running a large business. | |
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
The most important function in a business is human resources - without good human resource management the business would not survive. | |
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
I think that the admin department in a business is not valued as highly as other departments because they do not, generally, get paid as much. | |
|
|
|
Cartoon faces copyright: Nicola Mody
| Index | Previous | Next |
|
