‘What the university expects’: evaluating and co-constructing the teaching of assessment skills for first-year undergraduate students of education

Abstract

Transition from secondary school into higher education can be emotionally and academically challenging for students, and demystifying academic assessments and their requirements can help build students’ confidence as well as their attainment. Whilst there has been much focus on the importance of building students’ academic and assessment skills, less attention has been paid to students’ perspectives on how this can be best achieved, and there has been an under-utilisation of co-construction of learning to aid students’ skills development. As such this study aimed to use a participatory action research model to evaluate a series of workshops on skills development, leading to the co-construction of new and enhanced materials designed to develop students’ assessment skills further. Key threads emerging from the research include the importance of giving students opportunities to engage actively with exemplification and models, to make active use of rubrics and marking guidelines to build assessment literacy, and to practise assessment skills in line with rubrics, in a safe space. Such findings have useful implications for all tutors working in higher education contexts, both within and beyond the discipline of Education, which was the context for the study.