Practice makes Perfect

Assignment submission time is always stressful for students. There are the well-known issues that students face of decoding assignment briefs, managing multiple assignments, plus all the work that goes into completing assignments, getting the quotes and references right, and then the anxious wait to get the marks and feedback.

However, one potentially stressful stage that sometimes gets overlooked is the process of actually submitting the assignment. While this might seem like a minor stage in the process, it is a very important one, and is something that some students do struggle with, especially if it’s their first assignment, or uses a new/unfamiliar submission process, e.g., a video assessment. Additionally, and contrary to the popular myth, young people are not ‘digital natives.’ Many students come to university with low levels of digital ability and confidence, and for a lot of our students NILE will be the first VLE they’ve ever encountered, and the process of electronic assignment submission will be entirely new to them.

An excellent way to pre-emptively de-stress the assignment submission process is to adopt the view that it’s best to teach your students how to do all the things that you want them to do, including how to submit an assignment, and that’s exactly what the ITT (Initial Teacher Training) team do. In this guest post, Helen Tiplady, Senior Lecturer in Education (ITT Science), shares her approach to supporting students with the assignment submission process.

Here’s Helen:

Supporting students to submit their digital assessments correctly.

It may be due to our Primary school training backgrounds, but tutors in the Initial Teacher Training (ITT) team often share ‘What A Good One Looks Like’ with our students – otherwise fondly known as a ‘WAGOLL’.

One example I’d like to share with you was from a Level 4 science module (ITT1032) where students needed to complete a digital assessment piece. The premise was that they were planning a talk to a group of governors or sharing ideas at a staff INSET training day. The students needed to create a PowerPoint presentation along with their ‘speech’ written in the notes section. They then converted this to a PDF and uploaded this to the Turnitin submission point.

Although we have detailed, ‘step-by-step’ notes accompanied with screenshots for the students to follow as part of our assignment guidance, we have found that the most effective way for our students to upload their digital assessments correctly is through practice.

We offer a bespoke time during one of our learning events when students can observe the tutors demonstrate the steps to a successful submission (See Figure 1 below). We then ask the students individually to do a draft submission while the tutors are available to support and help with any issues. Finally, we ask the students to ‘teach each other’ on how to upload their assessment correctly to Turnitin.

This final step is crucial as this will allow the students to recall the steps more successfully at a later date. After all, Confucius is famous for saying “I hear, I forget. I see, I remember. I do and I understand.”

Figure 1: How to support students to upload digital assessments successfully

So, in summary, try and find some ring-fenced time in one of your classes for the students to do a trial run of submitting their digital assessments. Find a time when the stakes are low and there is no pressure of a looming deadline. And remember, the more the students feel prepared, the easier they will find it to submit their digital assessments correctly the first time.