Developing assessment skills awareness

Colleagues from across the Medical Sciences programme, led by Dr David MacDonald, Dr Dominic Wiredu Boakye, Dr Shalinee Dhayal and Dr Hannah Welters, support students within Academic Tutor Group sessions and activities to develop their academic and professional skills, including their awareness of assessment skills.

As part of core modules in Year 1 and 2 of the Medical Sciences programme (and the Professional Training Year for those who take it), all students engage with a Professionalism Award Assessment through their engagement with Academic Tutoring. Building on existing good practice in Medicine, part of the tutoring activities linked to the Professionalism Award Assessment require students to create and regularly update an e-Portfolio on their One Drive that they share with their Academic Tutor.

Within this e-Portfolio, students are asked to create folders in which to file the following:

• Employability and Professional Skills Information (via the Academic, Personal & Professional Learning Evaluation (APPLE) Form and an up-to-date CV)
• Academic Work and Feedback (all summative and formative coursework assessments, with feedback)
• Training and Professional Development (evidence that students have completed Academic Honesty & Plagiarism and EDI training modules, evidence of Exeter Award etc.)

By asking students to save and share all academic assessments and feedback, this part of the programme helps students to see their assessments as part of their learning journey. This also provides a template for students to begin creating a type of assessment and feedback log, as students are encouraged to file assessments based on the type of task (e.g. written report, poster, essay), rather than the module for which they were produced.

The Academic Work and Feedback section of the e-Portfolio helps students to build up a bank of examples for different assessment skills (with accompanying feedback) that they can then draw on for future assessments. For example, if a student is set a poster assessment in Term 2 of Year 2, they can easily go to their ‘poster’ assessment folder to look at previous poster assessments, using the feedback to identify what they did well last time and what to improve, building on this in their new assessment task.

In this way, students develop their assessment skills and literacy, regularly reflecting on and engaging with their previous assessment work as they develop in each skill. This is further supported by the assessment briefs for the Medical Sciences programme, which identify previous core modules with relevant skills for the assessment, and outline which skills the current assessment will help students to develop for future assignments.