As we’re rapidly approaching the end of June, it’s the time to reflect on our work so far and to look ahead for the next few months. As we’re still analysing some of our findings, this will necessarily be a ‘this is what we’ve done / this is what we’ll be doing’ kind of post, but hopefully I’ll be able to pepper it with some useful reflections that point toward our findings. Things should become more interesting in posts for our next phase as we start digging deeper into what students and staff have been telling us.
Stage One of the project has largely been completed. We started off by having a series of informal discussions with staff – through staff meetings, focus groups and one-on-one conversations – to let colleagues know about the project but also to get their insight into priorities, perceptions, problems and what they would like to get from the research. Although we issued a call to ALL students to engage them in the project, response was poor. So rather than a student project team, we have a student project lead (if you check out the blog posts, you’ll see he’s introduced himself) who is part of our full project team. His role is to be involved in the research, to act as an ambassador for the project, but also to involve groups of students in the work where appropriate and to consult them on the shaping of the research design. So far, this change in approach to engage groups of students in part of the project, but not necessarily having to commit to all of it, has worked well and, in fact, we tend to have a cohort of students who are regularly involved. The project has been discussed at Staff and Staff-Student meetings and we keep in touch with the University services like QuiLT (Quality in Learning and Teaching) to ensure the wider University have a feel for what’s going on.
As devotees of our blog will know, we have undertaken a student workshop using the Turning Point Student Response System (TPSRS) looking at assessment and feedback generally. While we expected a diversity of responses, in actual fact there was general agreement amongst the small cohort who attended. The responses were so identical that we followed this up with a parallel questionnaire open to all students in order to triangulate data and ensure data collection methods hadn’t influenced the results. This data is still being looked at but initial indications are that students are very much in agreement as to what constitutes feedback and how it is perceived. This is interesting given the variety of feedback mechanisms within the discipline – probably more on this to come. In addition more focused research has been undertaken into ‘Open Studios’ (our case study) with students from relevant stages. This data is currently being analysed but again, results are providing food for thought, particularly with regard to what students perceive as assessment, how they see the ‘usefulness’ of formats like ‘Open Studios’, and how this relates to feedback. From this we are already adding additional layers of research including further TPSRS sessions and further interviews with students and staff.
Our current priority is finalising a questionnaire to be issued to the sector. We have decided to undertake some research into the NSS results to target this more effectively which is why it’s still on the ‘to do’ rather than ‘done’ list. Alongside this we are accumulating relevant literature for the project to inform a detailed and rigorous literature review against which to situate our findings. We might well post a bibliography of this on the side, if possible.
Our next phase stretches from June to September but is a rather quiet period given that the students are all away working, travelling and probably thinking very little about assessment. We are hoping to follow up on the points noted above, although student interviews without students being present will be a challenge, so that might have to wait until early next term. The project team will be feeding back to staff on our findings to date and discussing how Open Studios sits within the current provision and, if necessary, making changes to the module documentation. We’ll also be preparing for phase 3 of the research – but more on that later.
Vee