Formative assessment of large groups

Academic secondee: Graham Sharpe

As a result of its considerable expansion, the sport-cluster of courses now have the largest number of undergraduates in the School of Science and Technology at NTU. Due to this, the Sport Academic Team are working at the highest student:staff ratio in the School. This project addresses the issue of providing effective and timely feedback to such large student cohorts.

Existing methods of coursework assessment are widely considered by academic staff to be time-consuming and inefficient. The large number of steps involved in the current systems make the return of marks and feedback to students, within a two week time frame, extremely difficult. It is imperative that coursework marks and feedback are returned to students promptly in order for them to enjoy a valuable learning experience. This project explored some possible solutions to this problem, including:

• providing students with full briefings, including instructions, checklists and assessment criteria
• offering general rather than individual feedback
• encouraging self and peer assessment
• using statement banks and feedback sheets
• reducing the amount of repetitive assessment.

For further information, download the project poster.