By Vicki Dale, Principal Academic and Digital Development Adviser, 5 Nov 24

There was so much to commend in the Autumn 2024 ALN CPD series, but what I’ll be applying to my practice is Rachel Fossey’s ‘Assessment for learning in action: Co-creating session content using Mentimeter’.

In the session, Rachel conveyed how she has used Menti to check in with her PGCE trainee teachers, to get feedback to steer class planning. While I’ve used Menti to incorporate opportunities for active learning in class, I haven’t used it to check in to see how my learners are doing, to inform my teaching.

My PGCAP course ‘Contextualising your educational enquiry, which I run with Dr Kim Davis, is a fully online course for academic staff at the University of Glasgow. The course was designed with constructive alignment (Biggs, 1999) in mind, with learning activities designed to help students work towards the assessment. However, not all students engage with the tasks that aren’t mandatory, due to their competing workload.

While the formative assessments give students an indication of their progress, not all students submit formatives, which leaves me feeling unsure of how they are getting on with the course until the summative assignments are submitted.

Like Rachel, I want to ask students how much progress they feel they have made on the course, as well as encouraging metacognition on their part in terms of identifying gaps in their knowledge, and giving them the opportunity to rate their confidence in being able to demonstrate the intended learning outcomes. I plan to embed this, asynchronously, before the Question & Answer session, which is the last session in the course, to guide our discussions and make sure learners feel fully supported.

Reference

Biggs, J. B. (1999). Teaching for quality learning at university: What the student does. Society for Research into Higher Education: Open University Press.