Category: Newsletter

Contemporary academic roles require university faculty to dedicate a significant proportion of their time to student learning and assessment.

Simplifying your assessment strategy reduces the assessment burden for you and your students. Done correctly, it will also improve the learning outcomes for your students as well.

You’ll release more time to invest in research and scholarship. Your students will learn what they need to know in a more authentic way, in the minimum amount of time.

This article explores 7 ways to make this happen:

1. Clear assessment criteria
2. Utilise automated grading tools
3. Implement peer assessment
4. Focus on essential feedback
5. Embrace formative assessment
6. Implement self-assessment
7. Enhance learning with multiple answer questions

Read on for more detail.

1. Clear Assessment Criteria

Clear expectations empower students to take the lead in their own learning.

Faculty that have an assessment brief ready at the beginning of teaching, with a clear marking rubric and evaluation standards, give their students the best chances of success.

Students ask less questions about the assessment if they can see what they have to accomplish. It’s easier for academics to evaluate how students have met the learning outcomes.

Marking is easier, faster and more consistent.

2. Utilise Automated Grading Tools 

Automated grading tools removes the burden of marking from faculty, after making a one-time investment up-front.

Modern Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) have a range of assessment tools that can be automated.

Multiple Choice Questions (MCQ) can be made more challenging using extended scenarios for each option instead of simple responses.

Marking is instantaneous, students receive their feedback quickly, and you can spend more time on other things.

3. Implement Peer Assessment

Fancy an approach to distribute the marking workload by fostering collaborative learning?

Engage students in the assessment process.

Get them to mark tests. Have them rank assessments as a class.

Students are often more critical of themselves and their peers than the faculty are. And it’s a fantastic collaborative activity where everybody learns something, including the observers.

This is one of the fastest ways for students to develop a holistic understanding of their peers’ opinions and abilities.

4. Focus On Essential Feedback

A focus on absolutely essential feedback helps students keep on task with their learning outcomes.

Broader feedback can help more capable students. But don’t neglect the essential information. Think carefully about what a student needs to know so that they can perform better next time.

This is especially important when an assessment requires some deep thinking. And the feedback has to be nuanced to provide an accurate and useful rationale.

Faculty have a unique position in being able to provide this feedback – do it correctly and your students will be rewarded with enhanced attainment.

5. Embrace Formative Assessment

Formative assessments help students learn when you aren’t around.

These are easy to implement with modern VLEs.

Pepper your curricula with frequent formative assessments so that students can check their learning and gauge their own progress.

Faculty can monitor how students are progressing and use this information to tailor content and support in future teaching. If necessary, you can intervene to help prevent misconceptions.

Help guide your students by providing them with the tools to steer their own learning journey.

6. Implement Self-Assessment

Students who can stand back and objectively assess their work become more reflective, capable individuals.

Give students the opportunity to self-assess their work prior to hand-in.

Show them techniques for being objective.

Talk them through evaluation frameworks.

Get them to be critical.

Practice reflection.

Students will quickly improve the choices they make and their rational for doing so. They will understand the compound effects of metacognition and take the lead with their own development.

7. Enhance Learning With Multiple Answer Questions

Multiple Answer Question (MAQ) assessments help contextualise learning and make it relevant to the real world.

Multiple Choice Question (MCQ) tests can be enhanced with the use of scenarios (see point 2 above). But for more advanced study, they can still not be enough.

MAQ assessments help develop the next level of learning. They can incorporate much more nuanced reasoning to answer them.

The questions can be modelled on real-world, complex situations or dilemmas.

Some VLEs even offer partial scores for nearly-correct answers.

Which means that MAQs can also be effective for formative assessment (see point 5 above). Test and develop critical thinking during the course and prepare students for more challenging fianl (summative) assessments.

Use your assessments to promote analytical thinking and watch your students develop real-world reasoning skills.

Find more time for the things you need to do, while improving your students’ learning.

Implement one or several of these strategies and you will release more time from your schedule. Enhancing your students’ attainment is likely as well – try out some of these ideas for yourself.

One of the most common problems that academic staff face is finding the time to write for publication.

Academic institutions often have performance indicators written into their strategy statements that reflect the publishing ‘productivity’ of a university.

These performance indicators become individual targets for academic staff. And you don’t want to explain to your manager why you have missed your publication target.

But you also realise that a solid list of published works is critical for your career and advancement.

Most academic staff have a rich and varied workload, balancing student needs, teaching, administration, citizenship and their own scholarly development.

The busy academic life, full of demands from a range of different individuals, often means that personal research takes a back-seat.

Here are some tips to get things back on track.

– Commit to writing 10 minutes per day

– Write for yourself

– Separate writing from editing

– Invest time in outlining

– Use snippets of time

Commit to writing 10 minutes per day

You will achieve more if your efforts are consistent. If you consistently de-prioritise writing then you will not be able to achieve success as an academic researcher.

Form a habit by committing to writing for 10 minutes every day, before you open your email. It doesn’t matter what you write.

Just write.

Write for yourself

At school we were taught to write for an audience. Our teachers made us write essays corrected our mistakes. They trained us to write the finished article in one go.

This is too hard. It makes writing academic articles too challenging.

First of all, we need to write for ourselves. You can start this in your daily 10 minute writing session. Write however you feel and don’t correct any mistakes.

Just get the words down.

You are the audience.

Write for you.

Separate writing from editing

At the end of the first working week you will have written for at least 50 minutes.

The words will be all for yourself.

Now, do some editing.

Tidy it up. Correct the spelling and grammatical errors. Make the text flow.

New ideas will appear. Include them if they fit with your text. If not, keep them somewhere to use another time.

Invest time in outlining

People who write for a living (think journalists, copy writers, etc.) use outlines to structure their writing.

Academic articles tend to follow structures that are common to different subject disciplines. Learn these structures and use them to plan your articles.

More time spent planning an article makes it easier for you to work on individual sections. When you work on a section you don’t have to think about the whole article. It’s easier to make progress.

Use snippets of time

Waiting for someone to arrive? Or you might be in a queue waiting for an appointment with someone.

There are lots of time ’snippets’ that go to waste. 10 minutes here, 15 minutes there.

You’ve been practicing writing for 10 minutes every day. Which means that you can write small amounts of text.

You’ve separated writing from editing. So you can choose who to write for when you sit down and write.

You’ve spent more time outlining and planning your articles. Keep the latest copy of your writing to hand – printed or on a device – and you’ll be able to make productive use of the next 10 minute delay when your manager is late to the meeting.

Just write or edit a paragraph for your outline and you shall be one significant step closer to finishing your article.

Take action today

Finding big, uninterrupted blocks of time to write can be difficult.

Establish an effective writing habit that makes use of the wasted time you already have.

– Commit to writing 10 minutes per day

– Write for yourself

– Separate writing from editing

– Invest time in outlining

– Use snippets of time

Consistency wins every time.