Three years ago, a number of Engineering Schools approached The Centre for Engineering and Design Education (CEDE), requesting the Centre’s help to unpick, from the students’ perspective, the assessment and feedback issues that were being highlighted by the National Student Survey (NSS). Their goal was to identify what the School could do strategically to enhanceRead more
Date: Friday 6th February Venue: BRI.2.08 – Bridgeman Building Time: 14.00 – 16.00 Come and discuss assessment! During January the Centre for Academic Practice (CAP) has been running a series of workshops and other activities focused on assessment. The CAP Forum, which will be the first in a regular series, will be an opportunityRead more
Exhausted from a deluge of assessment marking? You may be in agreement with Einstein, “It is simply madness to keep doing the same thing, and expect different results.” As Fisch and McLeod put it back in 2007… …we are at risk if we are using the same assessment practices to prepare students for a veryRead more
CASPA has been developed by CEDE (Centre for Engineering and Design Education) and is an online system that enables staff to schedule all types of degree programme and module assessments, to record student submissions/participation against assessments and to record the return of work/feedback to students. It is a large web based application with interfaces toRead more
Assessment via what? OMR stands for Optical Mark Recognition, a technology which is still widely used here at Loughborough for summative assessment – and yet many colleagues will know very little about the service. If you’d like to know more, we are running a ‘coffee and cake’ session on OMR as part of Focus On…Read more
TESTA is a methodology designed to address assessment and feedback issues at the programme-level. It is built on a robust, triangulated research methodology with qualitative and quantitative elements, and underpinned by educational principles and research literature. What problem is TESTA addressing? • The disconnect between assessment innovations at the individual module level and assessment problemsRead more
Assessment is a complex topic since it involves two distinct aspects. First, it forms an essential element of the learning process. Students learn both from assessment activities and from their interaction with staff about their performance in those activities. Second, it is the means by which academic staff form judgements as to what extent studentsRead more
Starting this month, the Centre for Academic Practice is going to have a different thematic focus every month throughout the academic year. The focus for January 2015 is ‘assessment’ which seems appropriate as we approach the examination period. For each theme we’ll have a range of workshops, ‘coffee and cake’ sessions as well as blogRead more
Jisc’s Assessment and Feedback Programme has been exploring ways in which technology can be used to address student dissatisfaction with feedback and assessment. Ros Smith, drawing upon this work, identifies four common problem areas, providing examples of interventions being developed to address each (Smith’s original blog post can be accessed here).
Problem 1
“assessment and feedback is by and large devolved to individual curriculum areas, making it hard for institutions to provide a consistent assessment experience and harder still to implement on any scale the enhancements technology can bring.”
Unsurprisingly they do. Research conducted in Belgium has identified a positive correlation between study time and performance in assessment. The research was conducted by Masui, Broeckmans, Doumen, Groenen and Molenberghs (2014) in the Faculty of Business Economics at Hasselt University, Belgium. It involved 168 participants (104 men and 64 women) across 14 courses. The results demonstrated that for theRead more