Project Plans for the New Year

I’m Andrew, a 4^th year medical student working on the F3 SALT team to improve feedback at the university. First of all I would like to say a big thank you to all level one students who engaged in our feedforward project in November. With so much data to go through it will be exciting to see what trends will emerge in our report based on the results. As well as providing us all with an in depth background relating to feedback transition from school to university, it also gives our project a good kick-start.

If you who have summative exams after the Christmas break (1^st years and other years alike) on behalf of our team we wish you good luck. For those of you who are having your first summative exams in January I hope you are not finding it all too stressful. If you’re struggling, check out the website below which I have found helpful in the past. At the end of the day it is about implementing work into your routine and not tiring yourself to death. The most useful thing I find is drinking lots of water!

http://www.topuniversities.com/student-info/health-and-support/exam-preparation-ten-study-tips

As well as wishing you luck, we thought we would give you a taste of what is to come for the New Year. After attending the annual steer group with the faculty leads involved with our feedback project it gave the team an idea of where to take the project and who to target. The plan so far is to work with ten individual departments, to build up a cross-section of disciplinary practice. We plan to produce produce feedback profiles that will provide evidence of the forms of assessment they use, education materials and training and information they provide to their students for how to obtain effective feedback. By comparing department results it will give us a better idea of what is working well and highlight areas for improvement. By discussing these issues with staff and students of all years in these departments, we can really get to grips with specific areas for feedback improvement. The student focus groups will be scheduled for February-March which will hopefully give you as students time to reflect on your feedback you have received for your summative exams.

That’s everything for now, have a very happy New Year’s Eve tomorrow and stay tuned on our blog over next year.

All the best,

Andrew

Feedback Focus Groups

After a month of hard work and campaigning, F3EDFORWARD month culminated with our feedback focus groups, which took place on 29 November in the IC. We wanted to host a lunch as we thought that a free lunch would be a great way to draw in hungry first years in-between lectures! Furthermore, we wanted to create an informal environment allowing people to have a drink and chat. We worked with a small group of 8 level one students from different departments and faculties. Having smaller groups enabled everyone to have ‘their turn to talk’ and it allowed us the time to question what people were saying to us. It was certainly a case of less is more!

We started off the focus group with a short introduction about the role of the SALTs and a brief overview of our project. We then split the group into 4 and had 3 SALTs with each team; one to facilitate, one to ask questions and a support. In our team, we were fortunate to have representatives from arts and humanities, sciences and engineering and law, which was a good mix. It became obvious that there were huge variations in the types of feedback that the first years had been receiving and there was some clear dissatisfaction. Science faculty students complained about MOLE tests where they received a mark but no feedback. In contrast, Arts and Humanities students were struggling with not having received any feedback as their assessments were taking place in January and they had done no assessed work so far. It became increasingly obvious that the nature of feedback depended on the type of work which was being undertaken and this has led to significant differences between subject areas. This has huge implications for our project as a cross faculty initiative; specifically how can we design feedback tools that can be applied over such different subject areas which have such different types of assessment?

Level one students also talked about the role of their mentors/personal tutors as good sources of information on receiving feedback and where they go for help and guidance. This is a way of receiving help with feedback that we hadn’t previously considered. It was encouraging to see how important feedback was to the students who arrived for the focus groups and the depth of the data and discussions we had will be invaluable for our research. It was a good finale to such a busy month!

Stay tuned to our blog post over Christmas! We’ll have a post-up each week about what’s going on. The team is currently in the process of dealing with all our data and we will be writing a report over Christmas about our findings.