TED team blog for SEMS/SoI at City University London
Posts tagged assessment
A Case Study of Interim Assessment in SEMS
Aug 10th
Guest Post by Christopher Wiley on SEMS’ Mary Aylmer’s use of interim assessments to help students focus on task & ensure their earlier work contributes to their final marks. Originally published on Educational Vignettes
Mary Aylmer is a visiting lecturer teaching the CAD part of the module CV1407 IT skills, Communication, and CAD. She has developed an assessment pattern in which students produce five pieces of CAD coursework, each of which involves completing engineering drawings. There are two interim submissions each weighted at 2% of the final module mark, two larger submissions weighted at 16% and 40%, and an end-of-module test also weighted at 40%.
The 2% weighting for the interim submissions is intended to ensure that the students’ early work on the module is taken into account in the final module mark, which helps to focus them to the task. The exercises are carefully graded and enjoyable for the students to complete; they tend to take ownership of their own learning as the assessments are designed such that they are able to determine exactly what is required of them, so they can aspire to high marks. More >
Self- and Peer Assessment using Turnitin in SEMS
Aug 2nd
Guest Post by Christopher Wiley on SEMS’ Cengiz Turkoglu’s use of Turnitin for self- & peer assessment. Originally published on Educational Vignettes
Cengiz Turkoglu principally teaches final-year undergraduate students and one of the MSc Aviation Management modules, with class sizes usually not exceeding 20 students. Each of his modules uses a similar assessment pattern comprising one coursework plus an examination. For the coursework component, he utilizes the self-review and peer review functions of Turnitin as part of the assessment.
The coursework has an initial deadline of a minimum of 6-8 weeks into the module to allow sufficient time for students to conduct research and write their essays. Once the students have submitted their paper, Turnitin’s PeerMark assignment function allows them to be either paired or randomly allocated another paper, which they are then required to peer-review. Given that there is always a range of standards represented by the students and their papers, one dilemma that Cengiz has faced concerns whether to pair the students randomly or to attempt to group them according to their standard. He never pairs them such that two students are asked to review one another’s papers.
Less Marking, More Talking
Jul 19th
Bulleted brain-dump of Graham Gibbs keynote on Assessment & Feedback at Learning @ City 2012 Conference
Gibbs key recommendation to improve student learning was to stop marking & turn summative assessments to formative ones. We were told it is more effect than anything else you can do.
- Formative-only assessment produces learning not summative assessment.
- Taking marks off things improves students performance.
- Students pay more attention to feedback when there is no grade.
- Summative to formative ratio in most UK universities is 10:1 It should be 1:10
Keynote PowerPoint Slides
Gibbs’ talk ended with a wider summary of recommendations: More >
