"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 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 prospect of correcting a pile of exam papers can be daunting. How do we ensure that we mark these fairly and consistently? This session will outline a process to help address these issues. As part of the session, we will discuss the value of an assessment rubric and a marking scheme, variation in marking and methods of minimising it.

In this session we will look at ways to structure an exam paper, consider ways to write good quality questions and what a good marking scheme and model answer might look like. Exemplars and examples will be used to explore aspects of what a “good” exam question might look like.

"Canvas, CIT’s recently adopted Learning Management System, presents many opportunities from a teaching and learning perspective for both staff and students. From a staff perspective, Canvas can assist staff with: Creating learning materials Communicating with students Providing grades and feedback to students. In this session, Eamonn demonstrated the capabilities and suitability of Canvas to assessing students using automatic grading. He demonstrated how in some subject areas both lab-based written reports and traditional paper-based assessments can be almost entirely replaced by Canvas."

This session explored staff attitudes towards assessment. The session focused on presenting an overview of assessment models that encourage, support and develop independence, self-regulation, etc. Components of these models were then explored in detail in later sessions.