Elliot Freeman, Department of  Psychology

With ever-increasing undergraduate student numbers, individual students can become lost in the crowd, and high assessment workloads make it difficult to provide sufficient feedback on students’ performance. To reduce workload, Elliot replaced some traditional exam essays on his second-year Visual Perception module with short-answer questions. He then coached his students on this new format and decided to provide new weekly workshops to engage students.

In these workshops, students discussed and then co-authored practice answers to short-answer questions based on topics introduced in the previous lecture. After a brief class discussion of the topic, students collaborated in small groups, writing their answer into a single SharePoint Word document. This document was easy for students to access and edit in a web-browser. The document was projected to the front of the class and updated in real time, then discussed in class and if necessary revised. SharePoint enabled different groups to work simultaneously on different answers, and to then get instant feedback that could be shared around the class. The resulting final document was then shared weekly to all students on the module as a comprehensive set of model exam answers.

Elliot summarised these teaching activities saying

“These sessions were fun and highly productive, and students loved it (as evidenced by their module evaluations). They provided a regular opportunity for focused revision, plus formative feedback and exam skills training. I found that the time invested in these seminars paid back as a reduction of marking, better exam performance in those who attended, and higher student engagement and satisfaction”.