We are delighted to announce our third external speaker to this year’s Annual Learning and Teaching Conference, Dr Dyddgu Hywel, senior lecturer in Education at Cardiff Metropolitan University.
Dyddgu studied BSc (Hons) ‘Design and Technology Secondary Education leading to Qualified Teacher Status’ at Bangor University, where she graduated with first class honours. Her early career started as a Design and Technology A Level lecturer at Coleg Meirion Dwyfor, before being appointed as a Design and Technology teacher at Rhydywaun Comprehensive School.
She has now been working at Cardiff Metropolitan University for the past seven years, working as a senior lecturer in the School of Education, with expertise in innovative teaching, student engagement and health and well-being. Following 8 years of playing rugby for her country in the red shirt, she has adopted several effective ways of living healthily, maintaining a positive mindset, and mastering a work-life balance.
Dyddgu’s workshop will focus on prioritizing the health and well-being of staff. The workshop will benefit all academic staff at the university, to identify effective ways of protecting their personal health and well-being, as well as providing pastoral care for all students.
Workshop objectives:
An opportunity to reflect on your personal health and well-being
Consider the right balance between everyday life and work pressures
Identify the role of educators in student health and well-being
Identify personal stress management, attitude and positive thinking
Adopt time management and prioritization
Promote Welsh-language resources for effective relaxation and reflection
Dyddgu will be presenting online through the medium of Welsh and we will be providing simultaneous translation.
The ninth Annual Learning and Teaching Conference will be held online between Tuesday 29 June and Friday 2 July. You can book a place by completing this online form.
As leader of our PGCTHE programme, I keep an eye out for resources to help staff teach effectively. These include webinars, podcasts, online toolkits, publications and more. Topics include active learning, online/blended teaching, accessibility/inclusion, and effective learning design based on cognitive science. Below I’ve listed items that came to my attention in the past week. In the interest of clarity, our policy is to show the titles and descriptions in the language of delivery.
Online events and webinars
7-9/6/2021 Heriot-Watt University, Learning & Teaching Academy open keynotes: Assessment for Learning, Building Community Online with Equity and Care, Towards a Resilient University: What have we learned from Covid?
21/6/2021 Educational Developers Thinking Allowed (EDTA), Online Learning Spaces as Troubled and Troubling places for Educators, email Fiona Smart to book
1/7/2021 Assessment in HE Network, AHE Conference Keynote talks: Joanna Tai: Assessment for diversity in the post-digital world, and Paul Ashwin: How teaching, learning and assessment without knowledge undermine the educational role of higher education
Quinlan, K. M. & Pitt, E. (28/5/2021) Towards signature assessment and feedback practices: a taxonomy of discipline-specific elements of assessment for learning, Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice
Please see the Staff Training booking page for training offered by the LTEU and other Aberystwyth University staff. I hope you find this weekly resource roundup useful. If you have questions or suggestions, please contact our team at lteu@aber.ac.uk. You may also wish to follow my Twitter feed, Mary Jacob L&T.
This conference is for anyone who is interested in multi-disciplinary academic research through the medium of Welsh. Scientists, humanists and sociologists from all over Wales and beyond are invited to share the results of their research and to meet other like-minded Welsh researchers.
The aim of the conference is to give the next generation of academics the opportunity to present their research to an audience of peers. It will also be an opportunity to network with Welsh-speaking researchers and to foster a wider community of academics who promote Welsh-medium provision in our universities.
Here is the full programme for the conference, which includes the conference schedule along with contributor biographies and abstracts.
During last week’s Mini-Fest we run a session entitled ‘Designing Anxiety-Free Assessments’. The session was based on A review of the literature concerning anxiety for educational assessments produced by Ofqual which outlines links between assessment anxiety, students’ performance, and mental health. It also offers possible assessment anxiety interventions which can be applied to both assessment design as well as its implementation.
Based on the review as well as discussions from the session we prepared a list of simple steps you can take to make assessments less anxiety-provoking for your students:
Replace fear appeals with positive encouragement.
Fear appeals, messages emphasising the importance of upcoming assessments, have been shown to contribute to higher levels of test anxiety, lower-class engagement and lower task performance (Putwain & Best, 2011; Putwain, Nakhla, Liversidge, Nicholson, Porter & Reece, 2017; Putwain & Symes, 2014). Instead of motivating students using fear appeals, try rephrasing your messaging into positive encouragement.
Help students set achievable goals.
In addition to providing students with information about how their final performance or paper should look like, it is worth adding some information on what steps they need to take to get there. Breaking assessments down into stages and suggesting approximately how much time they should spend on each part can be helpful to students, particularly those not experienced in managing university assessments.
Facilitate a positive learning environment.
As described in the review ‘positive learning environments can include: designing lessons that focus and building upon students’ strengths and abilities rather than identifying weaknesses; giving positive and accurate feedback; encouraging cooperative rather than competitive peer relationships; and encouraging students to be intrinsically motivated to study, rather than being coercive or focusing on the instrumentality of assessment outcomes(Jennings & Greenberg, 2009 as cited in Ofqual, 2020). How can you foster these elements in your classroom?
Modify the mode of assessment (if possible!).
Several specific assessment-design factors impact how anxiety-inducing they are. Making small adjustments to the assessment mode can make a difference to your students:
Instrumentality (how much impact the assessment appears to have on students’ overall grade): Breaking down or spreading out complex and heavily weighted assessments into smaller chunks will help students with managing their time better and create less pressure on doing well.
Complexity (how complicated the assessment seems to be): is there anything in the assessment design that could be simplified?
Evaluation (whether their performance will be evaluated by others): where possible consider minimising the impact of the social evaluative aspect of assessments by limiting the audience size or allowing students to submit a pre-recorded presentation.
Timing (whether their performance is timed): this one is applicable particularly in terms of exams which usually have strict time limits. It’s worth considering whether timed exams are the best way of measuring student progression on the learning outcome or whether there is an alternative assessment design you could use.
Help students feel prepared.
Increasing feelings of preparedness can also help in reducing assessment anxiety. Some of the things you can do to help your students feel more prepared are:
making assessment clear, detailed and accessible clear;
tying assessments clearly and obviously to learning outcomes;
linking skills they learnt throughout the module to those helping them in assessments;
communicating expectations (e.g. how much time they should spend on an assessment) clearly and repeatedly.
Finally, perhaps the most effective way of making students feel more prepared and help them get used to being assessed are mock exams and other formative assessments (Ergene, 2011).
Provide students with information about assessment anxiety & how to manage it.
Simply providing students with information about assessment anxiety being common among students and giving them links to some resources available to them (see below) can be helpful.
Resources:
Supporting your Learning module available to all student via Blackboard offers all essential information on assessments including a short section on tackling assessment anxiety.
Quick Guide to Student Success is a good starting point for helping students to build academic skills such as managing their time, effective study strategies and the ability to motivate themselves.
AberSkills pages (accessible also via Blackboard) offer students support on various essential skills including academic writing, referencing or employability.
Student Well-being Resources provide students with various resources which can help them in building coping strategies.
Although it may not be possible to design assessments that are fully anxiety-free, taking some of these steps can have a positive impact on students’ performance and wellbeing.
Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit (LTEU) is looking for a number of Student Learning Ambassadors to work on a ‘What is a well-designed Blackboard module?’ project. Issues with consistency and navigation of Blackboard modules are frequently raised in the feedback received from students (e.g., via the Information User Survey or the JISC Digital Insights survey). We would like to gather a small community of students who, through various User Experience methods, will work on this question. As part of this role, students will participate in focus groups, build their own Blackboard module and work collaboratively to report on the findings.
We are looking to recruit 8 students. This project will run between 05th and 17th of July 2021. Depends on the group, Ambassadors will be required to commit approximately 13 hours of work either in the first or in the second week of the project.
Please consider encouraging your students to apply for this role via the AberWorks portal where more information is available. The closing date is 21st of June.
As leader of our PGCTHE programme, I keep an eye out for resources to help staff teach effectively. These include webinars, podcasts, online toolkits, publications and more. Topics include active learning, online/blended teaching, accessibility/inclusion, and effective learning design based on cognitive science. Below I’ve listed items that came to my attention in the past week. In the interest of clarity, our policy is to show the titles and descriptions in the language of delivery.
Please see the Staff Training booking page for training offered by the LTEU and other Aberystwyth University staff. I hope you find this weekly resource roundup useful. If you have questions or suggestions, please contact our team at lteu@aber.ac.uk. You may also wish to follow my Twitter feed, Mary Jacob L&T.
Assessment Criteria serve a number of functions: to render the marking process transparent; to provide clarity about what is being assessed how; to ensure fairness across all submissions; and to provide quality assurance in terms of the subject benchmark statements. While all these reasons are valid and honourable, there are a number of issues at play:
Staff have greater or lesser control of the assessment criteria they are asked to use in marking student work and interpretations of criteria may vary between different staff marking the same assessment.
Assessment criteria are different from standards and the difference between the two must be clearly communicated to students (ie. what is being assessed versus how well a criterion has been met).
Students are often assessment motivated (cf. Worth, 2014) and overemphasis of criteria or overly detailed assessment criteria can lead to a box ticking-type approach.
Conversely, criteria that are too vague or too reliant on tacit subject knowledge can be mystifying and inaccessible to students, especially at the beginning of their degree.
This blog post will not pretend to solve all the issues surrounding assessment criteria but will offer a number of potential strategies staff and departments more widely may employ to demystify assessment criteria, and marking processes, for students. Thus, students become involved in a community of practice, rather than being treated as consumers (cf. Worth, 2014; Molesworth, Scullion & Nixon, 2011). Such activities can roughly be grouped chronologically in terms of happening before, during, or after an assessment.
Before
Use assessment criteria to identify goals and outcomes at the beginning of a module, with check-in points in the run up to a deadline.
Identify the difficulty in understanding marking criteria. Students are often used to very narrow definitions of success with clear statements that “earn” them points. Combined with a prevalent fear of failure, this can undermine their understanding of the criteria. Additionally, they may feel that they cannot judge their own abilities well in this new context (university). Group discussions not of what criteria mean, but what students understand them to mean, can help identify jargon that requires clarification, allow staff to explain their personal understanding (if they are the marker) and allow students to seek clarification before embarking on an assessment.
Highlight the difference between criteria and standards to students (the what and the how well – and how this is distinguished in your discipline).
Allocating time to a peer marking exercise using the provided criteria with subsequent group discussion will help students better understand the process.
Encouraging students to self mark their work pre-submission using the provided criteria will also help them better understand the process.
Using exemplars to illustrate both criteria and standards with concrete examples can be very helpful. This might involve students marking an exemplar in session, with subsequent discussion; annotated exemplars where students gain insights into the marking process; or live feedback sessions where students submit extracts of their work-in-progress that are used (anonymised) to show the whole group the marking process. This then allows for questions and clarification on the judgements a marker makes when working through a submission. Staff may worry that students consider exemplars as “the only right way” to respond to an assessment brief – providing a range of exemplars, especially good ones, can counteract this tendency. Different types of exemplars can be used:
‘Real’ assignments may be best for their inherent complexity (so long as students whose work is used consent to this use and their work is properly anonymised).
Constructed exemplars may make assessment qualities more visible.
Constructed excerpts (rather than full-length pieces) may be more appropriate when students first learn to look for criteria and how they translate into work as well as allay staff concerns about plagiarism.
During
Use the same language: making the links between assessment criteria, subject standards, and university standards clear through using the same terminology in feedback as appears in assessment criteria and subject benchmark statements.
Where multiple markers engage with different groups of students on the same assessment, having exemplars to refer to can help ensure clear standards across larger cohorts.
After
Refer students back to the assessment criteria and preceding discussions thereof when they engage with feedback and marks.
Reiterate the difference between criteria and standards.
Simply providing students with access to assessment criteria is not enough. It is essential that staff identify and clarify the distinction between criteria and standards and demystify the language of assessment criteria by examining tacit subject knowledge staff possess by virtue of experience. Using exemplars and group discussion of these in concretising how criteria and standards translate into a submission will provide students with insights into the marking process that enables them to better understand what they are being asked to do. Lastly, staff should repeatedly encourage students to make use of the availability of assessment criteria while they work on their assessments, which should enable students to feel better prepared and more focussed in their responses.
References:
Molesworth, M., Scullion, R., and Nixon, E. (eds.) (2011) The Marketisation of Higher Education and the Student as Consumer, London: Routledge
Worth, N. (2014) ‘Student-focused Assessment Criteria: Thinking Through Best Practice’, Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 38:3, pp. 361-372; DOI: 10.1080/03098265.2014.919441
We are looking forward to welcoming you to the 9th Annual Learning and Teaching Conference, which is just over a month away, 29th June – 2nd July 2021. This year’s conference theme, Improvisation within Constraint: Reshaping a Learning Community in a Time of Change aims to reflect the commitment that AU staff have to enhance the student learning experience.
You can register for the conference by completing this online form.
We’re very excited to welcome four external speakers this year:
This year’s keynote speaker is Dr Chrissi Nerantzi who is Principal Lecturer – Academic CPD, University Teaching Academy (UTA), Manchester Metropolitan University. Dr Nerantzi will focus on open and flexible pedagogies.
Our second external speaker, Andy McGregor, who is Director of edtech for JISC, will be delivering a workshop focusing on the future of assessments.
Our third external speaker is Dr Dyddgu Hywel, Senior Lecturer in Education at Cardiff Metropolitan, will be delivering an interactive presentation on prioritising student and staff well-being. (Dr Hywel’s presentation will be delivered through the medium of Welsh and we will be offering simultaneous translation.)
Our final external speaker, Joe Probert, who is Customer Success Manager at Vevox, will deliver a session on how to make effective use of polling to engage learners.
We have an exciting and varied programme this year from representatives from all faculties. In addition to our four external speakers, we will also have a presentation from students, Distance Learning forum and a Welsh-medium Business School panel.
We look forward to seeing you at the conference, and please remember to register for the conference by completing this online form.
If you have any queries, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
As leader of our PGCTHE programme, I keep an eye out for resources to help staff teach effectively. These include webinars, podcasts, online toolkits, publications and more. Topics include active learning, online/blended teaching, accessibility/inclusion, and effective learning design based on cognitive science. Below I’ve listed items that came to my attention in the past week. In the interest of clarity, our policy is to show the titles and descriptions in the language of delivery.
Please see the Staff Training booking page for training offered by the LTEU and other Aberystwyth University staff. I hope you find this weekly resource roundup useful. If you have questions or suggestions, please contact our team at lteu@aber.ac.uk. You may also wish to follow my Twitter feed, Mary Jacob L&T.
We are looking for staff who would like to share their experiences of using Blackboard interactive features, e.g. blogs, journals, wikis, tests, discussion boards. We welcome case studies in any format, e.g. short text, a video, voice memo. These case studies would be included on our blog and used in future training sessions. Please sent your case studies to lteu@aber.ac.uk
To learn more about different interactive Blackboard features:
