In this post, Professor Rachel Muers, from the School of Divinity, describes how a team of academic staff have trialed some new teaching approaches in a first year, first semester course: “Theology and Religious Studies Foundation Seminar” based on reflection and formative feedback. This post is part of the Mar-May Learning & Teaching Enhancement theme: Assessment and feedback revisited↗️.
How do we demystify assessment tasks so that students have the confidence to engage with them fully? How do we get students to engage with the study skills they need, when they need it? How do we support all our students, whatever their backgrounds, to adapt to university study?
A team of academic staff in the School of Divinity have worked over a long period to put together a first year, first semester course that would answer some of these questions. The “Theology and Religious Studies Foundation Seminar” had its first outing this year. It’s been an opportunity to try out various “new to us” approaches – some of them common in other Schools – and to evaluate how they might work for our students and our programmes.
One key principle of the Foundation Seminar is integrating study skills with engaging subject content. The course is taught by academic staff from different subdisciplines, each leading a seminar on a subject from their own research. Throughout the semester, students undertake weekly tasks based on study skills materials made available through Learn, drawing on the content of their specific seminar to do so. Early tasks cover generic study skills such as note-taking, time management and group work. Later tasks focus on key skills for written assessment, such as finding and evaluating sources, evaluating arguments, and referencing. The study skills tasks taken together formed one component of assessment.
We thus had a cycle of weekly short tasks, many of them reflective in nature, with regular brief individual feedback that are managed through logs on Learn. Staff could comment on students’ performance in the task, but also make further suggestions or encourage further reflection. Course staff made time to discuss the study skills task in the seminar each week, and were able to pick up on any common issues arising – or use their awareness of the students’ individual interests and strengths to encourage peer-to-peer learning.
In discussion, students who were “returners to education” were especially positive about how the study skills work had built up their confidence in the university environment. More generally, students appreciated the structure of weekly tasks with brief feedback each week; a representative comment was “it made it feel like I was progressing”. In some cases, course staff were able to pick up very early signs that students were having problems adjusting to university life, and to point them to relevant support.
These were outcomes that we had foreseen, or at least hoped for. What we hadn’t foreseen was how useful it would be for academic staff to have insight into the week-by-week “journey” of first-year students in their first semester, and how this could help our work across the board. For example, we saw how students’ planning for end-of-semester assessments is put on hold – quite reasonably – until the exam timetable is published. This insight can help us to adapt how and when we give students focused guidance on managing the end-of-term assessment load.
Another innovation on the course was an assessed small-group presentation midway through the semester. All the initial feedback suggests that this was a great success – building group cohesion, developing students’ confidence, and encouraging independent research and thought at an early stage. For this, and for the other in-course assessments (the final assessment was an essay), we used bespoke and simplified marking criteria. This was based on our standard School criteria, and presented with an emphasis on “what’s required for a pass and how you move beyond a pass”. The aim was to encourage students to treat all in-course assessment as formative, and students’ sense that they were “progressing” through the course gives some indication that it worked.
The School is now looking at how to maintain and develop the Foundation Seminar beyond its pilot year, and we are encouraged by positive responses from both students and staff. Beyond this particular course, the experience has encouraged us to think about key transitions in the student journey, and the specific support that students need at different stages.
This blog is based on my evaluation report on the Foundation Seminar. It comes with grateful thanks to the colleagues who worked on developing, creating and leading the course, including: Naomi Appleton, Suzanna Millar, Alysa Ghose, David Grumett, and Juli Colianni (Learning Technologist).
Rachel Muers
Rachel is Professor of Divinity, came to Edinburgh in 2022.