Patu™ Meke Meter: Use in the Classroom

Abstract

Patu™ Aotearoa (Patu™) is a social enterprise that is dedicated to the holistic health and wellbeing of local communities. Developed in consultation with the Patu™ whānau, the Meke Meter is an indigenous, image-based, holistic self-reflection tool that has minimal text, designed to capture an individual’s perception of their wellbeing. This pilot study extended the use of the Meke Meter into the tertiary education setting and began to explore the applications of the Meke Meter as both a culturally appropriate self-reflection tool for students and an educator assessment and/or evaluation tool. Throughout 2017, the Meke Meter was used by students enrolled in the one-semester Certificate in Health and Fitness (CHF) programme delivered on the Eastern Institute of Technology (EIT) Hawke’s Bay campus. Two cohorts of students n = 27 completed the Meke Meter at the start (round 1), middle (round 2) and end (round 3) of their educational programme. Due to completion rates outside the scope of this study, not all of the students that started the programme completed the programme. Results indicate that as a group the overall perception of health and wellbeing improved as the semester progressed, however significance was only observed in median scores in round 3 when compared to rounds 1 and 2 suggesting that students need to reach the end of the programme to demonstrate significant changes in their perception of health. Notable trends however were the reduction of minimal scores from rounds 1–3 and an interesting observation that semester two students started the programme with higher scores than those in semester one. A need for culturally sensitive assessment tools which do not focus on academic achievement alone has been demonstrated in the literature (Griffiths in Aust J Indig Educ 40:69–80, 2011). This pilot study presents a simple but versatile image-based tool which can benefit students and educators through increased awareness and knowledge of the students’ holistic experiences throughout their learning journey.