User talk:Norma Rothwell

Reflections on COLMSCT Science TMA workshop.

I came to the workshop with no preconceptions, but in the expectation of good company and some new perspectives on TMA’s.

The good company was as expected.

The information leaflets from COLMSCT were interesting when read after the day and the mouse mat works well. A nice touch.

Although I already had a good idea of the mechanism for producing TMA’s, the actual timescale was new to me. It proved to be quite illuminating – particularly the two ‘squash’ periods when those concerned really need the ability to fit 2 litres of time into 1 litre, with appropriate uncertainty.

When we came to perceived problems with TMA’s from the AL’s viewpoint, there were a number of shared concerns, anomalies, actual mistakes, ambiguities, leeway on word length, unrealistic expectations of students at their respective levels of study were ones I remember. One of my personal concerns is the quality of graphs, diagrams etc in the student notes. It seems to me to be poor quality feedback to students if these are not of the standard and quality expected of them, one example being graphs in a different format to the hand-drawn on graph paper provided requirement. For tutors on multi-disciplinary courses the mark schemes are sometimes obscure when marking ‘out of discipline’ and specialist knowledge is sometimes assumed.

Did we come up with any startling solutions in our group discussions? Well –yes, but whether they are practical or possible is another matter.

One was to try to re-arrange the schedule from draft to distribution to eliminate the ‘squash’ periods, so that writers are able to check and revise carefully.

Another is to ensure that writers are familiar with the whole of the course material and the requirements on students. (see advice in course guides etc).

The faculty might stick to a style of referencing throughout, e.g. that of Book 2 in S103. This has been requested by students at the OUSA Conference for at least the last two years.

Uncertainty of these last two causes much stress and anxiety to many students which could be avoided. They have enough without them!

So having put the TMA world to rights during the morning it was time to enjoy the lunch break – and we did.

Then came the excitement of being introduced to the assessment ‘wiki’. I must confess that I hadn’t a clue what a ‘wiki’ is, but have now been introduced and tentatively tried it out. No problems with the actual concept, but I can agree with some of my colleagues that one needs to keep a little salt handy when using it and not regard all the information presented there as ‘gospel’. For myself I still need to become more practised in using it. Will I do so? Time will tell, but I can see myself looking at it as a ‘lurker’ but not sure that I will have confidence enough in my own opinions to contribute much.

That is all – will it do Tony?