"BALI - Building Assessment Literacy Initiative - is a project to develop a suite of resources to support students and staff in the growth of competencies and capabilities in Assessment Literacy (AL). It aims to bring an interdisciplinary approach to the co-creation of these resources, with student-staff partnership at its core. In this session, participants heard about the most recent outcomes of the BALI project, where 3 teams comprised of a mix of staff and students co-created assessment and feedback resources in a partnership-based approach. We got a peek under the bonnet of the partnership-based approach hearing from both the staff and student’s perspective."

"How can we design assessment tasks, so they inspire our students to learn? How can we use assessment to enthuse our learners, and keep them engaged? What are the processes which underpin effective feedback and what are some of the barriers and challenges we face in helping students’ uptake of feedback? How can we approach feedback so that it is meaningful and useful to students, but manageable for ourselves? How far and in what ways do we involve students in the process of evaluative judgment, so they learn to see how they are going while they are working on tasks? These are some of the questions and issues that were explored and discussed in this interactive seminar on engaging students in assessment and feedback processes. Participants who attended this: Explored key principles underpinning the design of Assessment for Learning (AfL) in Higher Education (Sambell et al, 2013), which include assessment for and as learning; Discussed the benefits, challenges and strategies colleagues in different disciplines use to engage learners as productively as possible in assessment and feedback processes; Gained access to practical AfL resources, shared ideas with each other and considered pragmatic tactics to develop students’ assessment and feedback literacy."

"Assessment is probably the most important thing we can do to help our students learn. Traditionally, our assessment practices tend to be summative, for the purposes of progression and completion, rather than formative, for the purposes of improving instruction and student learning. If assessment is to be an integral part of student learning, formative assessment must be at the heart of the process. Formative assessment refers to a wide variety of methods that educators can use to conduct in-process evaluations of student comprehension, learning needs, and academic progress during a lesson, module, or programme. Formative assessments help educators identify concepts that students are struggling to understand, skills they are having difficulty acquiring, or learning standards they have not yet achieved so that adjustments can be made to lessons, instructional techniques, and academic support. If we wish to use assessment as a tool to enhance student learning the provision of formative feedback is crucial. We need to help students understand not only where they have gone wrong, but also what they need to do to improve and when they have done well, we need to help them understand what is good about their work and how they can build on it and develop further. This workshop was aimed at all academic staff, whether new to the whole notion of formative assessment and feedback, or those who wanted to improve their feedback practice to students, or those looking for innovative ideas on how to enhance their current practices. It provided participants with an opportunity to think about the benefits of formative assessment and providing formative feedback to learners and an opportunity to examine some case studies of how this can be done in practice."

"Assessment is a complex, nuanced and highly important process and if we want students to engage fully, we must make it really meaningful to them and convince them that there is merit in the activities we ask them to undertake. To focus students’ effort and improve their engagement with learning, we need to take a fresh look at our current practice to make sure assessment is for rather than just of learning, with students learning while they are being assessed rather than it being merely a summative end process. We also need to ensure that we provide explicit and implicit messages to students and indeed all other stakeholders about how we assess. By the end of this workshop, participants had had opportunities to: Consider how to make assessment truly integrated with the learning process; Review what kinds of feedback can be helpful to students in achieving their potential; Discuss how to make assessment manageable without losing the learning payoff that fit-for-purpose assessment can bring."

"If we want to improve students’ engagement with learning, a key focus of enhancement can be refreshing our approaches to assessment. Sometimes we need to take a fresh look at our current practice to ensure assessment is for rather than just of learning. In addition, we as educators in higher education understand the importance of giving good feedback to students, both to maximize achievement and to support retention. Research in the field suggests that good feedback has a significant impact on student achievement, enabling students to become adept at judging the quality of their own work during its production. In this workshop, the following aspects of assessment were considered: Fit for purpose assessment: designing assessments to promote student learning Assessing more students: ways of using productive assessment with large numbers Assessing first-year students well to promote retention Streamlining assessment: giving feedback effectively and efficiently"

"The power of assessment and feedback within the learning process has been recognised for many years and yet the paradigms that currently frame assessment leave students in a passive role and still largely focus on accreditation. This situation needs to be challenged through the development of assessment literacy of both staff and students which, in turn will make new approaches to assessment and feedback possible. This seminar discussed the nature of assessment literacy, why it is important, how it has the potential to reshape our thinking about assessment and feedback and how it supports the development of student learning. Participants were invited to take part in activities designed to allow them to share their expertise, review their practices and take away new ideas. The aim of the seminar was to: Explain the concept of assessment literacy Describe the contribution assessment literacy can make to supporting student learning Identify key initiatives that support the development of assessment literacy"

"While we as educators might hate to admit it, assessment does drive student learning and is probably the one most important thing we can do to help our students learn. Formative assessment can help us as educators identify concepts that students are struggling to understand, skills they are having difficulty acquiring, or learning standards they have not yet achieved so that we can make adjustments to lessons, instructional techniques, and academic support. If we wish to use assessment as a tool to enhance student learning the provision of formative feedback is crucial. We need to help students understand not only where they have gone wrong, but also what they need to do to improve and when they have done well, we need to help them understand what is good about their work and how they can build on it and develop further. This seminar focussed on how the Department of Mathematics and the Academic Learning Centre use Numbas, a free online platform aimed at numerate disciplines, to provide students with the opportunity to practice particular types of mathematical problems, receive instant feedback and advice on where they may have gone wrong, and to attempt other similar auto-generated questions. This seminar was aimed at academic staff who teach in a numerate discipline who would like to explore how they too can provide formative assessment opportunities to their students in an efficient and effective manner. Those who attended this session: Got an overview of some of the capabilities of Numbas Learned how Numbas can be used to enhance student learning Learned how a Numbas learning resource can be uploaded to Canvas."

While we as educators might hate to admit it, assessment does drive student learning and is probably the one most important thing we can do to help our students learn. Formative assessment can help us as educators identify concepts that students are struggling to understand, skills they are having difficulty acquiring, or learning standards they have not yet achieved so that we can make adjustments to lessons, instructional techniques, and academic support. If we wish to use assessment as a tool to enhance student learning the provision of formative feedback is crucial. We need to help students understand not only where they have gone wrong, but also what they need to do to improve and when they have done well, we need to help them understand what is good about their work and how they can build on it and develop further. This seminar focussed on how the Department of Mathematics and the Academic Learning Centre use Numbas, a free online platform aimed at numerate disciplines, to provide students with the opportunity to practice particular types of mathematical problems, receive instant feedback and advice on where they may have gone wrong, and to attempt other similar auto-generated questions. This seminar was aimed at academic staff who teach in a numerate discipline who would like to explore how they too can provide formative assessment opportunities to their students in an efficient and effective manner. Those who attended this session: Got an overview of some of the capabilities of Numbas Learned how Numbas can be used to enhance student learning Learned how a Numbas learning resource can be uploaded to Canvas.

Student engagement is a central concept in the literature on teaching and learning in higher education. Research has shown that students’ active engagement in their learning is central to their academic success and that students who engage deeply with learning are better equipped for life-long learning. However, encouraging student engagement can be challenging. So, what can be done - how can we encourage students to engage in their learning in what, for many of us, are quite challenging times? One way of achieving this is through assessment. Assessment is probably the most important thing we can do to engage students in their learning. Traditionally, assessment practices have tended to focus on progression and completion rather than focus on enhancing student learning. If we wish to use assessment as a tool to enhance student learning the provision of feedback is crucial. We need to help students understand not only where they have gone wrong, but also what they need to do to improve and when they have done well, we need to help them understand what is good about their work and how they can build on it and develop further. This seminar outlined how staff from different discipline areas have developed their assessment practices to integrate feedback as a central component of their practice. Three different case-studies were presented and discussed with the intention of providing participants with a range of practical options that they might choose from and integrate into their own practice. The seminar was aimed at all academic staff, whether new to the whole notion of assessment and feedback, or those who wanted to improve their feedback practice with students, or those looking for ideas on how to enhance their current practice.

Assessors complain that they spend hours devising and delivering good feedback via comments on assessed work, in class, in studio critiques, on the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), in one-to-ones and in tutorials, only to find that students seem to either ignore the formative comments or complain they never get any feedback. If students ignore or trivialise our feedback, it cannot help them however detailed and supportive it is. Students’ failure to engage with feedback not only is unhelpful to them and frustrating for us, but also impacts negatively on Irish Survey of Student Engagement (ISSE) scores.

Students put great store by the comments we put on their work. They often come to higher education with high expectations about the nature and value of teacher comments, and look to them to provide them with authoritative guidance on their learning and performance. Where that provision is found wanting, unhelpful or unconstructive, students rapidly become disenchanted, disappointed and alienated.