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Teach Talk! Innovative Assessment

Professional Development

Thursday 14^th November @ 10-11am on TEAMS

The first Teach Talk kicks off with 2 presenters describing novel approaches to assessment, we start with Dr Rosanna Walters-Symons who has been leading changes to feedback practice in Psychology @ Marjon. Rosanna is followed by a guest speaker, Dr Tünde Varga-Atkins from the University of Liverpool presenting her seminal work on multimodal assessment. Please do sign up for some fascinating insights into assessment. You can sign up here.

Assessment and Feedback Practices and Reflections: Psychology @ Marjon

Dr Rosanna Walters-Symons

Time: 10:00 - 10:30

About Rosanna: Rosanna teaches across a range of undergraduate and post-graduate Psychology, Sport and Exercise Psychology and research (MRes) programmes, with particular interest placed on engaging students in how psychology can be applied to performance contexts.

Rosanna specialises in the psychology of sporting performance and well-being. Her research fields are cognitive psychology, performance psychology and quantitative methods, with a particular interest in equestrian sport and participation.

The Teach Talk: In this section of the teach talk event we will share our current assessment and feedback practices, as well as our learnings, reflections and future considerations.

What we will cover:

Assessment guidance and support: canvas resources and guidance, peer marking, reviewing of previous feedback.
Marking and feedback processes: marking frameworks and rubrics, and feedback templates.

Psychology staff team: Review of our assessment and feedback practices. The primary impetus for this review stems from our ongoing commitment to regularly assess and enhance our working practices. In alignment with this, an external examiners' meeting at the conclusion of the 2022-2023 academic year provided further motivation. During this meeting, an external examiner introduced an innovative and effective method for delivering feedback to students, which was met with considerable interest.

Recognising the potential benefits of this approach, we decided to adopt and adapt this feedback method for use in 6 of our modules. Throughout the 2023-2024 academic year, we implemented this revised feedback strategy across our modules, allowing us to trial its effectiveness with respect to both marking efficiently and improving clarity for students.

The proposed talk will briefly outline the general assessment guidance and support available to our students (Part 1). It will then describes our feedback practice over the 23-24 academic year (Part 2). Our reflective comments will be incorporated throughout.

Multi modal Assessment

Tünde Varga-Atkins, University of Liverpool

Time: 10:30 - 11:00

About Tünde: Dr Tünde Varga-Atkins is a Senior Educational Developer at the Centre for Innovation in Education, University of Liverpool, UK and a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Her specific areas of research encompass areas in digital capabilities, signature pedagogies, curriculum design and evaluation, multimodal learning, assessment and feedback, learner experience research and scholarship of learning and teaching. Tünde is editor of Research in Learning Technology.

The Teach Talk: Digital media has transformed how we communicate, learn, and share information. Students today engage with multiple modes of communication in education, social settings, and the workplace, bringing diverse academic skills, communication styles, and cultural backgrounds to higher education (Bouchey et al., 2021). This diversity makes multimodal learning essential.

As educators, we must understand how students interpret materials and the various contexts in which learning occurs. Multimodal learning allows students to co-create knowledge through different forms of expression, drawing on their experiences in authentic social and cultural settings (Kress, 2010). It involves using multiple semiotic modes—such as text, speech, image, and sound—in designing learning experiences (Lim & Tan-Chia, 2023).

Multi-modal assessment uses diverse methods to evaluate students' skills and knowledge, moving beyond traditional exams and essays. It includes formats like presentations, group projects, portfolios, and digital content, catering to different learning styles and strengths. Students may also be offered a choice as to which format they would like to submit (flexible or negotiated assessment, for example, a report, a podcast or a video), or required to submit multiple pieces of assessments (e.g. patchwork including a written reflection, a video summary and an infographic) to demonstrate different competencies or learning outcomes. In both these examples of practice, the individual pieces themselves can be multimodal. In addition, feedback practices can also be multimodal.

Tünde’s work has been published by Advance HE and you can read more about it below. The section on multimodal assessment is on page 21.

Multimodal Learning: A practitioner Guide▼

Multimodal Learning - A Practitioner Guide_1713369112.pdf

Teach Talk! Recording ▼

Rosanna's Presentation Slides▼

Teach talk (Assessment) Nov 24 .pdf

Tünde's Presentation Slides▼

Multimodal assessment - Marjon- tva.pptx