Simon Roberts, Middlesex University, Business School
Ana Marinica, Centre for Academic Practice Enhancement (CAPE)
Karim Qizalbash, Learner Development Unit (LDU)
Simon Roberts started off the presentation by providing an overview of assessment literacy in the context of a project carried out in the Business School. The 12 week enhanced programme and MBS0111 Preparing for Business have been evaluated through an assessment literacy lens and findings were discussed as part of the session. Students enrolled on the enhanced programme failed to meet their conditional offer with regard to required UCAS points and were offered a 12 week course that aimed at preparing them for University. The programme was designed in collaboration with the Learner Development Unit. Interestingly, it consisted of 12 hours of teaching in a week, 6 of which were delivered by the LDU in order to develop students’ academic writing skills.
Assessment literacy can be defined as students’ ability to translate and appreciate the relationship between students’ learning and assessment as well as assessment criteria, feedback practices and the level of assessment they are presented with. Ana also highlighted the importance of assessment in a student’s learning journey. Assessment has been looked at with regard to what students find to be important, how they spend their time and at the end how they see themselves as students and later on as graduates. The key issue identified in this project is the fact that students often don’t understand what a good piece of coursework is and what is expected from them, especially with regard to assessment criteria.
Karim Qizalbash presented on how the team has employed a model by O’Donovan et al, (2008) - Approaches to Developing Student Understanding of Assessment Standards when evaluating the 12 week programme. The techniques Karim employed based on the feedback received from students at the beginning of the course were to make all the learning materials relevant to the assessment which included an essay and presentations. Formal 1-2-1 tutorials, general teacher lead instructions in seminars, individual/group tasks and peer review exercises were part of the 12 week programme.
The evaluation of the project consisted of both quantitative and qualitative data collection and two cohorts of students - enhanced and January start students were compared. The initial findings showed that the grades of the enhanced students were lower across all the assessments (with the exception of HRM1004), however the enhanced students had perceived higher clarity of the requirements of each assessment and were slightly more confident than their January start counterparts.
Most of the discussions which took place during the workshop evolved around the implications and possible issues of managing the enhanced students and how the findings of this project can be disseminated and put into practice by the Programme Team. For further details, please have a look at the video and PowerPoint slides from this session.
Report by Natalia Czuba, Educational Technologist, Centre for Academic Practice Enhancement (CAPE)
No comments:
Post a Comment