8. Reflecting

This is one of the most important components of the life-cycle because it is where the real learning takes place - students engaging with their feedback and using it to improve their future performance - and yet it is one of the areas which is supported least well in existing frameworks.

Both students and tutors should reflect on each assignment task they are involved in: students should reflect on their own performance and make themselves a personal action plan for the future, and tutors should reflect on the effectiveness of each part of the assessment cycle, from specifying to returning marks and feedback. It can be difficult to make time for this, with assessment usually coming at the end of a busy year, but it is worth making the effort.

For staff, York St John has a robust system for the monitoring and review of our programmes. This ensures that all of our programmes remain current; that they provide an excellent learning experience for students; and that they remain a viable and valuable asset to the University.

If you wish to change any part of the assignment specification following review, then you will need to read the guide to Programme or Module Amendments, and complete the relevant documentation from the Design & Amendment Toolkit.

For students, the Academic Tutor can play an important role in supporting academic development by meeting with students to review their progress. Encouraging students to summarise the feedback that they have received, paying particular attention to recurring comments in feedback on different assignments, can be useful in focusing support on issues that students are finding challenging. 

Checklist

Module Leader

• Review the effectiveness of assignment tasks annually and report back to the programme team as part of Programme Monitoring & Review
• Encourage students to reflect on their previous assessment performance before beginning a similar assignment, even if in a different unit and at a different level

Head of Programme

• Review assessment across each level annually, using results and student and staff evaluations as a basis for discussion

Assessment Lifecycle by Academic Development Directorate is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Based on work at Manchester Metropolitan University Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching, some of which was developed as part of the JISC-supported TRAFFIC project.