Supervisor: Clare Wallace and Sam Fearn
Research area: Education
Project level: 3rd year
Assessment comes in many forms: exams, written assignments, and e-assessments are examples that we use frequently in Maths at Durham, but there are hundreds of other approaches to take.
Similarly, feedback happens in lots of different ways: we are constantly conveying information about how we think students are doing. On the other hand, it’s hard to know how much of it you’re picking up!
This project aims to introduce you to the existing educational research on assessment and feedback. You’ll learn about different approaches to assessment and feedback, what makes them effective (and what we mean by “effective”), and critically analyse whether our widely-held beliefs really hold up against the evidence.
In the first part of this project, you will work together as a group to conduct qualitative analysis, in the form of a focus group investigating students’ perceptions of assessment and feedback. By the end of the group project, you will:
Learning in the first part of this project will be based on reading research papers and undertaking qualitative research.
Students will evidence their understanding by discussing theories and/or examples from the literature studied; integrating best practice in qualitative research into their work; and/or by analysing their results and synthesising them with the literature.
This understanding will be demonstrated through clear exposition and explanations in the oral presentation.
This is a project where you have a lot of scope to choose your own adventure. Informed by the results of the focus group, some interesting questions you could investigate are:
You can give this project a statistical flavour, by focussing on quantitative studies and digging into how they come up with their results and whether they’re valid. You could take a more technical/computational approach by learning about how automated assessment is used in higher mathematics.
You could also link assessment and feedback to another topic. You might want to think about how we can use it to support particular groups of students, such as international students, first-generation scholars, or students at the transition from school to University. Another direction would be to think about which other skills students are developing while they’re at University, and whether we can use assessment to push them further.
Learning in the individual part of this project will be based on further in-depth reading of a wide range of research papers.
Students will evidence their understanding by discussing theories and/or examples from the literature studied in more depth; considering the real-world implications of different pedagogical choices; and/or by designing assessment and feedback protocols to provide concrete examples of best practice.
This understanding will be demonstrated through clear exposition and explanations in the written report and oral exam.
Some interesting papers, to get you started:
How we assess mathematics degrees: the summative assessment diet a decade on (Iannone and Simpson, 2022) at https://doi.org/10.1093/teamat/hrab007
Approaches to feedback in the mathematical sciences: just what do students really think? (Grove and Good, 2019) at https://doi.org/10.1093/teamat/hrz013
Can multiple choice questions be successfully used as an assessment format in undergraduate mathematics? (Huntley et al, 2009) at https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC20914.
Using thematic analysis in psychology (Braun and Clarke, 2008) at https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa.