{"id":8075,"date":"2018-05-30T16:25:17","date_gmt":"2018-05-30T16:25:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk\/cel\/?p=8075"},"modified":"2018-06-01T11:13:40","modified_gmt":"2018-06-01T11:13:40","slug":"assessment-fiesta-in-hss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk\/flie\/2018\/05\/30\/assessment-fiesta-in-hss\/","title":{"rendered":"Key points from today’s Assessment Fiesta in HSS"},"content":{"rendered":"

This afternoon, the Assessment Fiesta for the department of Human Sciences and Public within HSS took place.\u00a0\u00a0Professor Debbie Holley opened the Fiesta and gave a short presentation on the wider context of education and the changing student demands over time, emphasising the role of assessment for education and inviting the attendees to make use of the resources available in CEL.<\/p>\n

This was followed by 3 presentations.<\/p>\n

1.\u00a0 Jonathan Williams led a fascinating workshop looking at how students engage in the assessment process.\u00a0 He began by asking questions about how academic staff understand the words often used in ILOs such as appraise, analyse, critique, reflect and synthesise.\u00a0 Discussing these in the session, it was clear that the attendees had slightly different understanding of these words and Jonathan expressed the need for there to be consistency of understanding in the minds of staff if the process of assessment and marking is to be equitable and fair.<\/p>\n\"\"<\/a>\n

Jonathan next raised some of the questions that students ask about assessment including whether the ILOs are equally weighted and how they should interpret the assessment criteria on the assignment brief; subject knowledge and understanding; intellectual skills; Subject specific skills and Transferable skills.\u00a0 Jonathan shared an example assignment brief that contained the weightings of the 4 assessment criteria and also a contextualised explanation of what the criteria meant in the specific subject area or unit.\u00a0 These listed how the areas were commonly demonstrated in assessments but also identified the common pitfalls that students should avoid.<\/p>\n

Beyond the information available to the student in the brief, Jonathan also talked about the scaffolding that students receive about the assessment including time spent between staff and students to translate the academic language of the ILOs and assessments into words that make sense to students and providing examples from snippets of past assignments to be reviewed by students with regard to the assessment criteria.\u00a0 This is further supported by Panopto videos for students to watch.<\/p>\n

The overall result is that students have a much clearer view of what the assessment is, how it is constructively aligned with the ILOs and how it will be assessed.\u00a0 In addition to the benefits of clarity of understanding, the process was also shown to reduce\u00a0student anxiety about assessment which is vital to students\u2019 mental wellbeing.<\/p>\n

2.\u00a0 Clare Killingback ran the second session on using alternatives to written feedback for students.\u00a0 The alternatives encompassed audio (using Turnitin), video and screencast (using Panopto).\u00a0 Based on her own literature review, Clare identified the key aspects of these alternate feedback methods from the student perspective.\u00a0 These were:<\/p>\n