student feedback and leadership - Office for Learning and Teaching

Part B: Building Leadership Capacity - SET: Mathematics & Geospatial Sciences ART Report
MATH2114
Both math and stats components changed to 60% exam and 40%
assessments. The stats component changed to 60% final exam, 30%
weblearn tests ( one test every 3 weeks starting from week 4) and 10%
on 10 weekly problems and 10 Lab assessments ( 1 marks per week for
10 weeks starting from week 2). Their weekly problems and lab assessments
were marked and returned to them. We also removed the quiz attempts and
replaced it with 10 attempts on each test. This was requested through their
feed back comments as well as in their student’s consultation meeting in their
home departments. However the pass rate on the weblearn tests were pushed
up to 80% which required them to have more attempts till they completely
understood the material. We also added another 250 questions to the
question bank bringing the total number of questions to 500.
We also added a 10% optional assignment “to design” a practical problem
in their respective field which can be solved using topics discussed in the
course. It was also emphasized that they must use real data from their field
to design the problem. More than 30 students took up the challenge. Some
of the projects were very well-designed and very interesting. They were asked
to use real examples and real data from their own discipline. The feed back
was positive in that they could feel the importance of the course and the
reason for having it as a compulsory course in their discipline.
A few staff tried to use more online assessment to improve the feed back
issues. The analysis clearly shows that for some of our courses the score
on the CES feed back has improved.
Other staff in the school were informed about the analysis and the good
practices through staff meetings at different times of the year and were
encouraged to adopt the positive practices that were proved successful.
MATH1277
Detailed analysis of the students’ performance on the Math1275 final exam
identified several factors that appeared to affect the student performance,
including the placement of the correct answer, the wording of the question
(positive or negative style) and the number of available responses. The first
topic test was redesigned to attempt to counter these affects with a reasonably
high degree of success. Students were provided with detailed verbal feedback
on the test and were invited to discuss their understanding of the questions
and available responses. Information gained through this process was used
in designing both the second topic test and final exam in an effort to obtain
a more accurate measure of the student’s abilities.
The computer lab exercises were also refined, particularly for the Bundoora
campus students. The exercises were collected, marked and returned with
detailed comments to assist in future performance. The sixth lab session
was altered to become a collective revision of all previous exercises and topics.
These lab exercises will be further refined next year and become optional
exercises with the 10% assessment component being assigned to two small
computer projects. These two projects, based on research literature from their
discipline, will contextualise and summarise the skills learnt from the exercises
and lectures and allow for greater flexibility in facilitating student learning.
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