Ideally you’ll be a third-year BSc student (otherwise, you probably want to look at my fourth-year project instead).
You’re interested in thinking about how and why we (your lecturers) make the choices we do when we set and mark assessments. This is a project with a lot of reading, and potentially a lot of writing (but maybe fewer equations?). There’s a lot of scope to incorporate some statistics in here, as well.
Assessment comes in many forms: exams, written assignments, and e-assessments are examples that we use frequently in Maths at Durham, but there are hundreds of other approaches to take.
Similarly, feedback happens in lots of different ways: we are constantly conveying information about how we think students are doing. On the other hand, it’s hard to know how much of it you’re picking up!
This project aims to introduce you to the existing educational research on assessment and feedback. You’ll learn about different approaches to assessment and feedback, what makes them effective (and what we mean by “effective”), and critically analyse whether our widely-held beliefs really hold up against the evidence.
This is a project where you have a lot of scope to choose your own adventure. Off the top of my head (and with no promises that any of these will definitely be an easy question to answer!) some interesting questions are:
You can give this project a statistical flavour, by focussing on quantitative studies and digging into how they come up with their results and whether they’re valid.
You could also link assessment and feedback to another topic. You might want to think about how we can use it to support particular groups of students, such as international students, first-generation scholars, or students at the transition from school to University. Another direction would be to think about which other skills students are developing while they’re at University, and whether we can use assessment to push them further. If you’re really motivated you could carry out a small educational study of your own, subject to ethical approval.*
*: getting ethical approval can take a while! You’d need to have settled on a research question before the end of Michaelmas term, which is pretty ambitious.
We’ll spend a bit of time talking about critical reading and developing the skills we’ll need to really analyse the research papers we look at. I’ll start us off with some papers on different approaches to assessment and feedback, and some of the relevant questions, then it will be over to you to decide what sort of questions you want to investigate.
Some interesting papers, to get you started:
How we assess mathematics degrees: the summative assessment diet a decade on (Iannone and Simpson, 2022) at https://doi.org/10.1093/teamat/hrab007
Approaches to feedback in the mathematical sciences: just what do students really think? (Grove and Good, 2019) at https://doi.org/10.1093/teamat/hrz013
Can multiple choice questions be successfully used as an assessment format in undergraduate mathematics? (Huntley et al, 2009) at https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC20914.