Developing your Assessment and Feedback Judy Cohen Curriculum Developer Unit for the Enhancement of Learning and Teaching

Developing your Assessment This session will look at how students view assessment, and how it impacts their learning Ideas about assessment design to help students to learn will be discussed including ways to make feedback relevant to students Current projects aimed at enhancing assessment will be presented, and staff will have the opportunity to discuss particular concerns they have about assessment and feedback in their modules Developing your Assessment and Feedback, Judy CohenPage 2

Assessment: according to students I think assessments and things generally run the risk of turning your degree into something that you go and you’re just looking for the marks and it’s just about pleasing the examiner and ticking the boxes that they want, and it’s not always about learning the real stuff you’re just taught how to pass an exam, and it shouldn’t be like that, especially at university where there’s so many different things going on that you can learn stuff, but it does feel like that sometimes, all you’re doing is chasing that exam Developing your Assessment and Feedback, Judy CohenPage 3

Assessment: What is included? Summative assessment in three schools…  case notes, case study, computer calculations, critical analysis, critical review, dissertation, essay, exam: timed, exam: short answer, exam: MCQ, legal problem, groupwork, outline, participation, plan, portfolio, poster, presentation, problem solving/calculations, progress report, project, report, role play, written argument/response  And in other Schools…? Developing your Assessment and Feedback, Judy CohenPage 4

Understanding the assessment It’s trial and error, it’s asking your mates, it’s some people go to the lecturer, some people will look at previous, because previous years’ work as well, it’s just trial and error Every single lecturer’s got a different requirement for how you answer their questions. So you need to be able to pinpoint, OK, this is so and so person,... So you, if you don’t know your lecturers then you’re done for basically There’s no point in learning when you know you can’t get a good grade Developing your Assessment and Feedback, Judy CohenPage 5

Formative assessment How are students learning how to do the assessments?  Guesswork  Other students  Exemplars  Draft work Developing your Assessment and Feedback, Judy CohenPage 6

Guesswork If students don’t know where to start they are likely to leave work too late  Collusion (collaboration?)  Quick internet search… Supporting the learning process Developing your Assessment and Feedback, Judy CohenPage 7 ?

Other students Collaborative work  Groupwork  Peer related tasks  Peer assessment / self assessment (more on this later) Developing your Assessment and Feedback, Judy CohenPage 8

Exemplars I think with any kind of new topic that we get, maybe a case study or something with an example, you feel immediately apprehensive about it because you know that maybe the example isn’t good enough, or maybe the example’s completely different to what they actually want. So you question yourself a lot while you’re making it, while you’re doing the assignment That’s why it’d be nice to see, like, a model essay, even if it’s totally irrelevant, just to know what sort of structure to expect Developing your Assessment and Feedback, Judy CohenPage 9

Draft work / practice but he spells out to us, he wants to give us a really good grade and he tells us this is what I want from you. Whereas other lectures will kind of say, this is how you’ll get penalised we had a mock paper and they put feedback online of what, they required... that was good Schools and staff treat draft work very differently Developing your Assessment and Feedback, Judy CohenPage 10

Assessment: is it relevant to the student? you approach it just as what you need to learn for that essay and you try and knock it out as quickly as possible you’re not really learning, you’re just doing it for the sake of getting a good mark or …you’ve got the part where you’ve got this, these continuous assignments. It just encourages you keep up to date with everything Developing your Assessment and Feedback, Judy CohenPage 11

Feedback vs feed forward we don’t know when we’ll get the feedback, it just appears, and it’s not really enough, it’s just a couple of lines or a scribble here, or just crossed out a word. It’s not, it’s not really helping in future work the lecturer actually broke down the sub topics and actually indicated what things we did good on and what things we need to improve on. So I thought those two part assignments, the feedback on those were actually quite good Developing your Assessment and Feedback, Judy CohenPage 12

And then the marking… There’s no consistency. The lecturer tells us something else, the seminar leader expects something else and you don’t know where your work will end up... You don’t know who will mark your work Yeah, and then there are seminar leaders that are quite generous and they don’t expect as much, and other seminar leaders that are incredibly picky Developing your Assessment and Feedback, Judy CohenPage 13

Peer and self assessment Pathway to self sufficiency in assessment What are the programme learning outcomes? Ways of making peer and self assessment workable  Group tasks in class  Marking exemplars  Peer feedback  Self assessment sheets Developing your Assessment and Feedback, Judy CohenPage 14

Current assessment projects Transforming the experience of students through assessment (TESTA) report about programme assessment  Mapping programme assessment patterns  Interviewing staff  Focus groups with final year students Developing your Assessment and Feedback, Judy CohenPage 15

Current assessment projects Evidence based quality improvement programme (EQUIP)  Profiling assessment in the Faculty of Social Sciences  Enhancing assessment practices (equivalence)  Improving quality of contact hours (feedback) Developing your Assessment and Feedback, Judy CohenPage 16

References Bandura A (1977) Self-Efficacy: Toward a Unifying Theory of Behavioral Change, Psychological Review, V84, No2, pp Biggs J (1999) Teaching for quality learning at university: what the student does, Buckingham: Open University Press. Marton F & Säljö (1976) ‘On Qualitative Differences in Learning — 1: Outcome and Process’, Brit. J. Educ. Psych. V46, No1, pp4-11. Meyer J & Land R (2005) ‘Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge (2): epistemological considerations and a conceptual framework for teaching and learning’, Higher Education, V49, No3, pp Developing your Assessment and Feedback, Judy CohenPage 17

Nicol, D & Macfarlane-Dick, D (2006) ‘Formative assessment and self-regulated learning: A model and seven principles of good feedback practice’, Studies in Higher Education, V31, No2, pp Sadler D (1989) ‘Formative assessment and the design of instructional systems’, Instructional Science V18, No2, pp Price, Handley, and O’Donovan 2008 ‘Feedback: all that effort, but what is the effect?’ Conference paper publ 2010 with J Millar. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, V35, No3, pp277–289 Gibbs G & Simpson C (2004) ‘Conditions under which assessment supports students' learning’, Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, V1, No1, pp3-31. Developing your Assessment and Feedback, Judy CohenPage 18