TLU Resources

"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."

Instructors often state that they provide lots of feedback but to little effect. This session will explore some of the reasons why this may happen and outline options for engaging students with assessment and feedback. In particular, providing choice, opportunities to apply feedback and cultivating trust are all known to encourage students to engage with the assessment processes.

Quality feedback (i) recognises what is good (ii) identifies limitations and (iii) suggests how the work could be improved. Shifting feedback responsibility from instructors to learners. Self-assessment & peer-assessment

While presenting learners with the assessment criteria and standards is good practice - they don’t necessarily result in learners developing a good understanding of the criteria and standard. This session explores the importance of dialogue around assessment and how a shared understanding of assessment requirements can be developed by applying rubrics to exemplars.