Journal of Academic Development and Education JADE Issue 11 Summer 2019 | Page 35

Driving learning through assessment analytics * Adrian Molyneux ([email protected]) Abstract: An ongoing central aim in the School of Medicine is to maximise the utility of our assessments data to give students the highest quality feedback. Our analytics site, the 'Feedback Portal', is a key element in the delivery of the new programme. It is used by students to gain a real-time understanding of their level of learning, and it underpins and informs regular student-tutor meetings. This ensures all students can access rich, timely and personalised feedback, discuss improvement strategies with tutors and devise plans for their implementation. Students are able to elect to share their feedback with others, further strengthening communities of practice within the PBL-centric curriculum. The project is based on a bespoke data collection and analysis system linked to a personalised web portal, all developed from the ground up within the school. Students make heavy usage of the feedback portal immediately following the release of results. Separately, tutors report their satisfaction with the new streamlined electronic marking processes and their preference over the previous paper implementation. Conclusions: A huge amount of 'meaning' can be extracted from assessments data, and this can be used to facilitate interesting new modes of learning. full academic year. The strategy incorporates many aspects of contemporary thinking surrounding effective assessment-feedback practice, placing strong emphasis on the development of students’ assessment and feedback literacy through dialogue [1-5]. The approach is characterised by a series of iterative assessment-feedback cycles that are supported by scheduled assessment briefing sessions coupled to a range of formative and collaborative learning activities related to aspects of report writing. Having evolved the approach over a number of years, we find that students recognise and appreciate its rationale, show good engagement with the associated learning activities and, providing they fully engage across the year, produce work that evidences acquisition of reporting skills to a high standard for early undergraduate students. Its originality and value lies in its clarity of purpose, the early exposure of 1st year undergraduates to journal articles, the novel assessment and feedback strategy, and the parallel, iterative development of a range of key skills including those related to information retrieval, data communication and analysis. The approach is flexible and adaptable to local contexts and academic disciplines. Taking up the Slack - Slack as a learning space * Ian Stimpson ([email protected])# Abstract: A Dialogic Approach to Developing Students' Scientific Reporting Skills * Dave McGarvey ([email protected]) Abstract: Our aim is to initiate the development of the generic skills of early undergraduate chemistry students by focusing on scientific reporting skills. To achieve this, we have developed an approach that draws upon chemistry journal articles as paradigms of professional conventions and practice, coupled with an assessment-feedback strategy that spans a The aim of this project is to develop a rich, closed, online learning space that can be used not only for student interaction and collaborative learning but also to run simulations of natural disaster scenarios to teach geohazard mitigation methods. Slack is a set of online collaboration tools including themed channels (chat rooms) that can be organised into partitioned learning spaces. It has advantages over Facebook or linked-in groups in that the content is closed to the outside world (important when simulating natural disasters online) and not part of the students’ own personal online spaces, whilst being easier to use than discussion boards on the KLE. Access is via web interface or desktop / Re f l e c t i o n s o n K ee l e Lea r n i n g a n d Tea c h i n g C o n f e r e n c e 35