In this post, the Teaching Matters editorial team present a reflective round-up of the March-June 2024 Assessment and Feedback Revisited series, offering five future directions for advancing assessment and feedback practices at the University of Edinburgh. (Please note: this blog post format and the LinkedIn newsletter is currently replacing the Teaching Matters Adobe Express newsletter format).
Introduction
The University of Edinburgh’s Assessment and Feedback Principles and Priorities were rolled out from the start of academic year 2022/23. During this year, and documented in our first Teaching Matters’ Assessment and Feedback series, the University focussed on addressing the ‘Principles’ that set the baseline expectations for assessment design, assessment processes, feedback, student involvement, and programmatic coherence and oversight. However, the latest National Student Survey results tell us that we still have some way to go in terms of meeting some of these, in particular, feedback turnaround times and the helpfulness of feedback.
Now in the second year since the Principles and Priorities implementation, we have revisited the University’s current practices around assessment and feedback in a new Teaching Matters series: Assessment and Feedback Revisited, containing 19 blog posts. In the introductory blog post, Professor Tina Harrison highlights that beyond the basic expectations (‘Principles’) we have also established a set of key Priorities. These encourage greater emphasis on authentic assessments, assessment for learning, assessment inclusive by design and student partnership in assessment.
In this round-up post, we outline ‘Five future directions’ drawing from the 19 blog posts in this ‘Assessment and Feedback revisited’ series.
Future direction 1: Purposefully seek avenues for dialogue and co-creation
The importance of student involvement, dialogue and co-creation in assessment practices is underscored by several contributing authors. Professor Vel McCune discusses the importance of meaningful dialogue in improving feedback practices. She refers to the National Student Survey open-ended comments, saying:
“One thing that struck me in the negative comments, is how many students across all three Colleges felt that marking was inconsistent, feedback was unclear, or that they didn’t understand what they needed to do to be successful. So, what is going on here?”.
Highlighting the ambiguous nature of written and spoken language in the context of feedback, Vel suggests organising tutorials, workshops and small group sessions aimed to engage students in meaningful dialogue about what makes for good academic work using diverse exemplars. Further, she emphasises the usefulness of faculty development activities, for instance, markers coming from different levels of experiences can work on mock papers together and discuss disparities. At a larger level, she inspires hope that this dialogue should be echoed in strategic policy changes in HE funding and workload models.
Dr Su Goopy and Dr Neneh Rowa-Dewar highlight the importance of co-creation in the context of assessing the quality of feedback provided to students. They ask:
“If feedback is potentially so valuable, so familiar to us, and so ubiquitous within higher education, why is it that when it comes to assessment and marking, feedback is often dealt with awkwardly and with trepidation? At what point has this familiar practice become such an uncomfortable companion?”
They describe a feedback checklist co-created to audit feedback against nine key areas, to name a few, the tone of feedback, identifying strengths and areas of improvement in the work, and signposting resources that feedforward. Inspired by and partly based on their work, Dr Michael Daw discusses a feedback template that helps standardise the quality of feedback on student work across markers. He reiterates the need for dialogue and student involvement:
“In particular, we will try to get more student opinions on the template. Full roll out across our undergraduate programmes will only happen if students appreciate the change”.
Dr Deborah Holt details the co-creation of grade related criteria matrix, that is co-creation at the level of drafting grade descriptors for each assessment criterion. Such co-creation in assessment leads to a greater understanding of expectations among students, fosters ownership and comprehension of their learning.
Future direction 2: Innovate assessment strategies that tap into student engagement
Challenging the culture of performativity, Dr Emily Taylor describes how staff at the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CAHSS) are turning learning activities into assessment activities. Emily describes three key implementation approaches in which student and staff engagement plays a key role:
- Listening to our students by engaging with the student representative body,
- Establish standards, and honour autonomy with staff consultation across the school
- Understanding our Schools are diverse in subject matter, philosophies and epistemologies, and student and staff demographics.
Dr Steven Sutcliffe and Dr Kirsty Murray explain how they have been drawing on visual resources to engage students with assessment tasks. Steven uses the ‘Take picture of religion’ task to creatively engage students with analysis through photography. Kirsty works with an ‘Image of the week’ task where students are directed to find an image each week that they feel encapsulates the themes from the lectures, nominate it as the “Image of the Week” and post it on a Padlet board. Along the same lines, Claire Fisher describes a mini clinical exercise in which students select tasks themselves allowing them to focus on the areas they feel they require improvement.
Professor Rachel Muers describes how a team of academic staff have found that incorporating reflection and formative assessment helps students build group cohesion, develop confidence, and move towards independent research and thought at an early stage.
Discussing student engagement in the context of formative peer assessments, Medical students, Robbie Carnegie, Maggie Livingstone, Harrison Loader and Diana Stamatopoulos, discuss the benefits and challenges of formative peer assessments. They highlight:
“…learning from peers creates an encouraging learning environment where students can collaborate on ideas and empathise with the struggles of learning topics that they too have recently learnt”.
Providing engaging, purposeful, and meaningful assessment tasks as learning opportunities can drive student learning and motivation.
Future direction 3: Proactively promote accessibility and inclusivity in assessment design
Several blog posts in this series highlight the importance of accessible and inclusive assessment practices. Victoria Buchanan explores the alignment of the Accessible and Inclusive Learning Policy with the University’s Assessment and Feedback Principles. She explains:
“Under the Equality Act, the duty to make reasonable adjustments for disabled students is anticipatory. This means we must proactively design our learning, teaching, and assessment to ensure disabled students can fully participate and achieve, and not just wait for a student with a particular disability to turn up and then make retrospective adjustments for them”.
With regards to accessibility, she adds, if you get Universal Design for Learning (UDL) right, the benefits to all students in their general learning experience can be extremely conducive to a happy student cohort and productive learners.
Sylvia Western and her PhD supervisors discuss the culturally inclusive assessment model by Lambert, Funk and Adam (2022), and suggest potential avenues for educators to work towards inclusive assessments in medical education. They advocate for the diversification and decolonisation of assessment content, co-creation of assessment activities, and the integration of principles of socio-cultural justice, decolonisation, and cultural competence into the teaching and assessment process.
AI generated Image [Adobe Firefly]
Brodie Runciman and Gary Standinger underscore the importance of clarity and detail in assessment expectations, and describe how the developed a holistic rubric. They shared:
“Students appreciated having a well-defined rubric before they engaged with the task, which explained what was expected of them. Upon reflection, the rubric effectively communicated ‘what went well’ and ‘what could be better’ but was less effective in guiding students on how to improve future responses. As for us as staff, the rubric helped provide quicker feedback and increased our confidence in assigning marks”.
Reiterating the importance of meaningful dialogue in the understanding of expectations from the assessment instructions, rubrics and exemplars, Dr Jess Gurney notes these expectations were not equally understood by all students. To make assessments inclusive and fair, Jess suggests these practical messages:
- Use clear, jargon-free instructions and rubrics
- Provide annotated exemplars to clarify expectations
- Support students with proactive discussions about assessments
- Use feedback to clarify future expectations while emphasising transparency and value.
In considering accessible practices that involve digital tools for assessment and feedback, Stuart Nicol outlines the new Flexible Grading View interface in Learn Ultra. This interface will provide an improved marking experience for teachers and course teams to view, and leave feedback on, student assignments and tests in Learn.
Future direction 4: Embrace Educational Technology with an understanding of educational literature
Professor Tim Drysdale sets out a call to action for educators to embrace a broader view of assessment, which, coupled with support for an institutional culture that links educational theory to interventions (and evaluating the outcomes), can create fertile ground for the productive use of GenAI in Higher Education. Along the same lines, Sylvia discusses AI integration potential in the construction of clinical vignettes for assessments and teaching in health professions education.
In the context of adapting assessments to the post-pandemic world, Steven O’Hagan and Jon Beer explain how they have implemented the online marking tool Gradescope into their courses, making use of edtech to assist and improve marking efficiency. They outline the practical benefits it offers:
- For coursework, it has reduced the admin around sorting and distributing paper.
- Submissions can also be returned to students as soon as they are marked rather than having to wait until their next class.
- For exams, the administrative workload has shifted from sorting exam scripts and keying in marks, to scanning scripts once exams have taken place.
Future direction 5: Rethink assessments from a siloed course level to a more holistic programme level
Prof Patrick Walsh and Dr Neil Lent unpack the programme-level assessment method and explain why it is an important approach for effective curriculum design. They explain this holistic approach integrates learning from different parts of a programme, fostering a more coherent educational experience and reducing the fragmentation often seen in course-level assessments. Implementing programme-level assessment requires either systemic changes to institutional regulations or integration within existing course structures. In the latter method, assessments still reside in specific courses, but explicitly draw from multiple courses or across multiple years. Challenges include coordinating large or diverse programmes, accommodating student choice, and aligning joint programmes.
Dr Alison Cullinane discusses how their School developed and assessed reflective portfolios for seven courses in first and second year. In the first year, students engage in weekly reflections on personal and academic themes to aid their transition to university, while in the second year, they use their portfolios to support mock internship applications. This portfolio approach reflects a broader trend towards rethinking assessments, moving from isolated course-level evaluations to a more unified, program-level strategy that enhances overall student learning and development.
Conclusion
In summary, the five future directions for advancing assessment and feedback practices at the university are:
- Emphasising the importance of seeking meaningful dialogue and co-creation with students, which aims to enhance assessment and feedback clarity through collaborative efforts.
- Advocating for innovative assessment strategies that actively engage students, and utilising creative methods that are purposeful, relevant and forward thinking.
- Stressing the need to proactively promote the design on accessible and inclusive assessments, which enriches the educational experience for all.
- Thoughtfully embracing educational technology, leveraging tools like GenAI and online platforms to enhance efficiency and support varied learning needs.
- Encouraging a shift from isolated course-level assessments to a holistic programme-level approach, and integrating learning across courses and years to create a more coherent educational experience.
You can read the Collegiate Commentary to this series from Professor Jan McArthur at the following blog post: Collegiate Commentary: Five future directions from the ‘Assessment and Feedback revisited’ series.
Sylvia Joshua Western
Sylvia is currently doing her PhD in Clinical Education at The University of Edinburgh and has a Master’s degree in Clinical Education. Her PhD research explores test-wise behaviours in Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) context. She has worked as a PhD intern at Teaching Matters, through Employ.ed scheme at the Institute for Academic Development.
Jenny Scoles
Dr Jenny Scoles is the lead editor of Teaching Matters. She is an Academic Developer (Learning and Teaching Enhancement), and a Senior Fellow HEA, in the Institute for Academic Development. She provides pedagogical support for University course and programme design. Her interests include student engagement, sharing practice, professional learning, and sociomaterial methodologies.
