Innovative Assessment and Feedback Mechanisms for Placement
This event shared the changes made to the assessment and feedback mechanisms on placement as part of a pilot project within the School of Business, MTU Cork Campuses. The pilot project was undertaken with funding from the National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (NFETLHE) within MTU as part of the university’s Reimagining Assessment and Feedback Together (RAFT) series of interventions. These changes were made following feedback from Geraldine O’Neill’s NFETLHE Research Fellowship study on 'Assessing Work-Integrated Learning' last year.
Innovative Assessment and Feedback Mechanisms for Placement
This event shared the changes made to the assessment and feedback mechanisms on placement as part of a pilot project within the School of Business, MTU Cork ...
BALI Demystifyinig staff student partnerships in assessment and feedback
"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."
Improving the Assessment & Feedback Experience for You and Your Students
"Assessment is probably the most important thing we can do to engage students in their learning. However, not all forms of assessment are created equal!
Whilst there are many benefits of using authentic assessment approaches and providing feedback, teaching staff can face challenges in terms of large class sizes and their own constraints around resourcing and time.
This session was an interactive workshop for staff which focused on redesigning assessments to make them a more authentic experience for students whilst ensuring they are manageable from a staff perspective. Participants were invited to send any assignment briefs, or past exam questions that they would like help with redesigning so that they are more authentic, prior to the session. A selection of these were then used as “live” cases at the session. Contact bali@cit.ie for more information."
Improving the Assessment & Feedback Experience for You and Your Students
Assessment is probably the most important thing we can do to engage students in their learning. However, not all forms of assessment are created equal!
Whilst there are many benefits of using authentic assessment approaches and providing feedback, teaching staff can face challenges in terms of large class sizes and their own constraints around resourcing and time.
This session was an interactive workshop for staff which focused on redesigning assessments to make them a more authentic experience for students whilst ensuring they are manageable from a staff perspective. Participants were invited to send any assignment briefs, or past exam questions that they would like help with redesigning so that they are more authentic, prior to the session. A selection of these were then used as “live” cases at the session. Contact bali@cit.ie for more information.
Towards Assessment for Learning in Higher Education: engaging students in assessment and feedback processes
"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."
This seminar considered key theoretical perspectives on work-based assessment.
It discussed:
The nature of work-based learning and its role in:
Developing key graduate skills
The wider life-long learning society.
Different approaches to work-based learning practice, including the new apprenticeship model.
The context of learning, including the role and responsibilities of both the learner and the employer, with a focus on authentic assessment approaches that support individualised learning.
Participants were encouraged to bring along module descriptors, related to learning in the workplace, so that these theoretical perspectives could be applied to practice.
n the workshop component, participants, in small groups, discussed, critiqued and developed the methods and processes that they currently use to assess placements in their own disciplines. They were encouraged to examine the ways in which current theory and best practice could inform and develop their disciplinary approaches.
"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."
Recent Developments in Assessment & Feedback Methodologies
"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"
Developing Assessment Literacy in Students – Intentional Interventions
"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"
Providing learners with feedback is known to be one of the most impactful things we can do to enhance learning, it can also be very time-consuming. Often it also seems that learners are not acting on that feedback. This session will explore issues with feedback, and ways in which learners can be provided with feedback that are both efficient and effective for us. We will discuss the ‘power of words’ and explore the value of commenting constructively on assignments and assessments.
Providing learners with feedback is known to be one of the most impactful things we can do to enhance learning, it can also be very time-consuming. Often it also seems that learners are not acting on that feedback. This session will explore issues with feedback, and ways in which learners can be provided with feedback that are both efficient and effective for us. We will discuss the ‘power of words’ and explore the value of commenting constructively on assignments and assessments.
Summative Assessment in Canvas using Automated Grading
"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."
Good quality feedback can have a huge impact on student learning and performance. In the Feedback session, we will highlight some ways of getting good quality feedback to students fast.
How a module is assessed has long been recognised to have a huge impact on what and how students learn (think Leaving Certificate Exams). Here, some guidelines for developing assessments that promote understanding will be presented
Working on Reflection - Supporting Students to Reflect on Work Placement
Reflective practice is a key skill in many professions including education. but is particularly relevant to students in the context of work placement. We as educators expect students embarking on work placement to have, at some point in their studies, developed sufficient reflection skills to enable them effectively capture their learning from the placement experience. However, this is not always the case as students often receive little explicit instruction, practice or guidance about how to reflect. In this seminar participants will be guided through the process of reflection and engage in reflective practices. There will be opportunities for discussion in breakout rooms. Discussions will cover how other colleagues are engaging students on reflection in placement settings. Expect to be busy at this workshop with reading, discussion, shared practice and maybe even some drawing.
Working on Reflection - Supporting Students to Reflect on Work Placement
Reflective practice is a key skill in many professions including education. but is particularly relevant to students in the context of work placement. We as ...