Currently viewing the tag: "Outside the box"
Leading Public Health Practice (NURM009) includes learning and teaching activities that are predominantly facilitated via online learning. It was felt that a clear strategy was needed whereby students would be able to identify clearly how the activities and associated feedback can contribute to their summative assignment.
Students work sequentially through five learning units, each of which contains a brief overview of theoretical concepts and supported with structured on-line activities. Each learning unit concludes with a summary identifying how learning from each on-line activity can be utilised within their summative assignment.
For more information about this assessment, please contact Sue Everett, Senior Lecturer—Advanced Practitioner (Sue.Everett@northampton.ac.uk)
This case study is taken from the Institute of Learning and Teaching’s 2015 publication ‘Outside the Box Assessment and Feedback Practices’, available from the University’s Assessment and Feedback portal.
Within the School of Health we have a fundamental role in preparing and supporting people to work with the public, patients, carers and service users. We feel it is only right that these people should be involved in as many aspects of this as possible. We believe patients/service users and carers should be part of providing feedback on health and social care undergraduate students’ values and behaviours.
This is reinforced by the UK Government, who promote the idea that patients should contribute to the assessment of pre-registration student nurses. The Nursing and Midwifery Council promotes the idea that patients should contribute to the assessment of preregistration student nurses. With a strong emphasis currently on nursing becoming a more compassionate profession, the Francis report (2013) has highlighted a need to recruit, educate and assess nursing students with regard to their attitude, values, and beliefs in relation to providing care.
Who better to ask than the patients/service users and carers?
The following process was piloted and then implemented within all undergraduate nursing, midwifery and podiatry students from March 2014.
- Undergraduate students are introduced to service user and carer involvement and the role of the service user/carer in student assessment in first module of their education programme.
- Service user and carer feedback tools are available and are given to the Mentor by the student on placement.
- The Mentor/Assessor follows a four step process.
- Students’ practice learning documents have specific area for discussion with Mentor and recording Service user/carer feedback.
An e-learning activity was developed to support Mentors in this process. This is now an Open Education Resource available from http://find.jorum.ac.uk/resources/18963. Patient information posters were made available in practice areas and on digital display within patient areas in hospitals.
For more information about this assessment, please contact Linda Lilley, Senior Lecturer in Practice Development (Linda.Lilley@northampton.ac.uk)
This case study is taken from the Institute of Learning and Teaching’s 2015 publication ‘Outside the Box Assessment and Feedback Practices’, available from the University’s Assessment and Feedback portal.
We use ‘concept maps’ as an assessment tool within the Volunteering module (SWK1003). Students visualise the sub-concepts that make up a main concept. They can draw this out using whatever form or tool they want. It requires minimal grammatical competence but needs to show good conceptual understanding. The results were outstanding.
For more information about this assessment, please contact Mark Allenby, Senior Lecturer in Social Work (Mark.Allenby@northampton.ac.uk) or Victoria Boulton, Teaching Research Assistant (Victoria.Boulton@northampton.ac.uk).
This case study is taken from the Institute of Learning and Teaching’s 2015 publication ‘Outside the Box Assessment and Feedback Practices’, available from the University’s Assessment and Feedback portal.
Having redesigned her Leading Public Health Practice module from being fully face-to-face, to blended, Sue Everett in the School of Health, reflects on the skills she developed in the process and how she has moved from being a ‘technophobe’ to the ‘go to’ girl for technology in her office!
If you have any questions about CAIeRO, or would like to book one for your module team, please email LD@northampton.ac.uk. If you would like to talk further to Sue about her experiences, she is happy for you to contact her.
Facilitation, Assessment and Quality Assurance in Work Based Learning (MIDM006) has two items of assessment, one of which is an action learning group presentation which is self, peer and tutor assessed. This is followed by a moderation discussion that supports students using and understanding the use of grade criteria and giving verbal and written constructive feedback which is an essential part of their role in practice. This is an innovative approach to assessment that has previously been presented at an HEA workshop.
This approach is also used in Quality Enhancement in Interprofessional Work Based Learning (MIDM007). Both these modules make up the MSc Practice Education. We can have big discrepancy between self, peer and tutor grades and discussion can be quite lively. It is stipulated that the tutor has overall responsibility for the final agreed grade from a quality assurance perspective. We have been persuaded to move but have never moved out of the grade band and we do have discussion about this when we are grading ourselves. We have a normal distribution of grades and we have referred students however we have never had students refer themselves or their peers.
As this is a group project we allocate all group members with the same grade however every group has opportunity to speak to the tutors if they feel strongly that someone has not properly contributed to the activity, there must be unanimous agreement from all other group members about this. On one occasion a group felt strongly that one member had not contributed and her grade was altered to reflect this.As well as the action learning students submit a 4,000 word critical reflective account and students are required to pass both items of assessment for both modules.
For more information about this assessment, please contact Ali Ewing, Principal Lecturer Learning and Teaching (Ali.Ewing@northampton.ac.uk) or Sue Everett, Senior Lecturer—Advanced Practitioner (Sue.Everett@northampton.ac.uk).
This case study is taken from the Institute of Learning and Teaching’s 2015 publication ‘Outside the Box Assessment and Feedback Practices’, available from the University’s Assessment and Feedback portal.
Students take individual readiness assurance tests, then take the same test as a group. The group use the trademarked Instant Feedback Assessment Technique, essentially scratchcards, so they immediately know if they got the right answer. By assessing the students’ readiness to move on to application exercises we should be able to address gaps in learning early on.
‘Getting Started with TBL’ by Larry K. Michaelson is available here: https://www.med.illinois.edu/FacultyDev/Classroom/InteractiveMethods/Michaelson.pdf
For more information about this assessment, please contact Nick Cartwright, Senior Lecturer in International Commercial Law (Nick.Cartwright@northampton.ac.uk)
This case study is taken from the Institute of Learning and Teaching’s 2015 publication ‘Outside the Box Assessment and Feedback Practices’, available from the University’s Assessment and Feedback portal.
“For 3 years now I have run an assignment in my 2nd year SPO2002 Sport and Society module which originated as a ‘digital storytelling’ idea for a group project assessment. Students are asked to complete a small scale social research project on a topic related to inequalities in sport. I take them through each ‘stage’ of the research process (we have 7), and every week the seminars become group meetings in which students are asked to make decisions related to each stage. I set up a NILE journal tool for each group, and they are required to write a formal journal entry for each of the 7 weeks where they document and justify (with the aid of appropriate references) the choices they are making in relation to topic, methodology, design etc.
Upon completion of their journal diaries, I ask them to create a 5-10 minute movie documentary which should present their research project using these 7 stages as ‘chapters’ in their movie. I offer 30% of the mark for creative communication of their work, and students have come up with some fantastically original ideas (last year’s highlight was the use of Lego figures to present a group meeting with Emile Durkheim, a famous sociologist).
Attendance for this part of the module is always high, and students often comment that they have never worked harder than on this assignment (a good thing?!), and take a lot of pride in getting their movie just right.”
For more information about this assessment, please contact Dr Jim Lusted, Senior Lecturer in Sports Studies (Jim.Lusted@northampton.ac.uk)
This case study is taken from the Institute of Learning and Teaching’s 2015 publication ‘Outside the Box Assessment and Feedback Practices’, available from the University’s Assessment and Feedback portal.
In Introduction to Theatre and Performance Theories and Practices (DRA1021), each group creates an online lecture based on a particular play. The online lecture must include performance work, text, visual images, and verbal analysis that contextualises and discusses the selected play and historical period. Essentially, this online lecture is an annotated piece of performance practice. One outcome from this assessment is that each participant will receive a suite of online presentations (the collected presentations) that they can use as teaching resources in their future careers. In this way we seek to make the assessment more relevant to each student, increase their engagement, and add value to their degree.
For more information about this assessment, please contact Dr James McLaughlin, Lecturer in Acting and Drama (James.Mclaughlin@northampton.ac.uk) or Dr Hayley Linthwaite, Senior Lecturer in Acting and Drama (Hayley.Linthwaite@northampton.ac.uk)
This case study is taken from the Institute of Learning and Teaching’s 2015 publication ‘Outside the Box Assessment and Feedback Practices’, available from the University’s Assessment and Feedback portal.
The Department of Engineering within the School of Science and Technology offers a unique course in non-destructive testing both at a foundation and bachelor degree levels. Since its inception, the course has been delivered in distance learning mode to accommodate the cohort of students who are interested in the course. They usually work in full time jobs in different parts of the world. Moreover, their jobs involve travelling to remote places for long periods of time at short notice.
While the provision of learning packages has been facilitated and organised through NILE (the University’s Virtual Learning Environment), the assessment posed a number of challenges in terms of quality and rigour. This is evident from the high portion of students who achieve grades exceeding A-. One may argue that this is a testament to our quality of tuition of this course. However, it is difficult to reconcile these results with the assessment conditions where students are offered six weeks or more to answer a set of questions in an open book style and without the usual exam type time constraint. Furthermore, the external examiners have often expressed a concern about the distribution of grades. Professional accreditation bodies such the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE) would not accredit a course where standard type exams do not represent a large proportion of the assessment.
Our aim and that of the accreditation institutions is to ascertain that a student with a mere pass is able to function as an engineer and the assessment should reflect that. In order to address this issue, we have sought to harness the capabilities of NILE to improve the quality of our assessment for distance learning students. We created assessments that include a range of question types from formulae to essays to cater for students with different skills. We also generated the same question with a different set of numerical values for each student using regular expression on NILE. Despite our best efforts, this has not resulted in a distribution of grades that is representative of students with different capabilities, albeit, there is a marked improvement. On a close inspection though, the essay type questions seem to produce a range of grades from a simple pass to distinction.
We have then generated a case study in non-destructive testing and invited students to submit an academic report discussing their approaches to the problem. In order to make the problems more interesting and thought provoking, we suggested using non-destructive testing methods that are non-standard and ask students to use their creative minds to make it work. We expect the distribution of the overall grades to change as a result of these changes. Thus far, it has proved to be instructive for students and lecturers alike. We intend to solicit some feedback from the current cohort of students to learn about their experience.
For more information about this assessment, please contact Dr. Abdeldjalil Bennecer, Senior Lecturer in Engineering (Abdeldjalil.Bennecer@northampton.ac.uk) or Professor Phil Picton, Professor of Engineering (Phil.Picton@northampton.ac.uk)
This case study is taken from the Institute of Learning and Teaching’s 2015 publication ‘Outside the Box Assessment and Feedback Practices’, available from the University’s Assessment and Feedback portal.
In the Paramedic Science division we use Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs) to assess practical application of skills. For example, advanced life support can be demonstrated on mannequins using all of the actual equipment required. In practice sessions we asked the students to video their attempts on SMART phones, iPads or other devices, which can then be uploaded to NILE (the University’s Virtual Learning Environment). These could then be viewed for self, peer and tutor review as formative assessment and feed-forward to improve performance. Initially, the students found this to be daunting but eventually came to value the opportunity to self-assess and refer back to their performance on past videos.
For more information about this assessment, please contact Sarah Cross, Senior Lecturer, Paramedic Science Division (Sarah.Cross3@northampton.ac.uk)
This case study is taken from the Institute of Learning and Teaching’s 2015 publication ‘Outside the Box Assessment and Feedback Practices’, available from the University’s Assessment and Feedback portal.
