Effecting Sustainable Change in Assessment Practice and Experience (ESCAPE)
The ESCAPE project is a JISC funded Curriculum Delivery Project run under the Transforming Curriculum Design and Delivery Through Technology Programme.
There is little that has more influence on student learning than assessment.
Assessment describes to students...
What is important and what is not
When they need to pick up their books and when they don't
Whether they need to think about the subject at the macro or micro level (holistic / partialistic)
Whether students need to abstract their thinking outside the module or constrain their thinking within the module
Our project ...
The ESCAPE project responds to national and institutional concerns regarding assessment and feedback. Working with two Schools the project will develop assessment for learning activities to enhance the assessment experience for learners and staff. We will draw together curriculum development activities and change management techniques to investigate and embed the use of ICT to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of assessment practices. The project will identify activities and practices that will be transportable to all disciplines and will act as a springboard for widespread change in philosophy, strategy, policy and practice across the Institution.
Aims and Objectives
The overarching aim of the ESCAPE project is to enhance the assessment experience of students and staff.
Objectives supporting the aim include:
Creating a baseline of current practice
Establishing the likely learning potential of current assessment practice
Developing and implementing appropriate ICT supported assessment activity
Evaluating the impact of the assessment interventions against dimensions of resource efficiency and educational effectiveness
Engaging in embedding activity to ensure the sustainability of the developments
Disseminating findings to the Institution and the wider community
We are seeing transformative changes to assessment practices in the modules that the ESCAPE team have worked with. There is a much greater emphasis on the application of assessment-for-learning approaches. The pedagogy is supported by the use of appropriate aligned technologies such as; use of student-produced videos, Podcasts, Blogs, electronic submission of coursework, use of StudyNet to support group work and the use of wikis.
There have also been collateral effects where the assessment practices of modules not directly associated with the ESCAPE Project have been influenced. This has typically occurred where staff from modules associated with the ESCAPE Project has worked with and influenced colleagues on other modules. Additionally staff from other modules have approached the project team with requests to work with them in order to support their current assessment practice.
The ESCAPE toolkit is being used more widely in the University of Hertfordshire as a way of encouraging and enabling schools to map their current practices to established good principles in learning, teaching and assessment and to highlight areas where the current curriculum and assessment practices are not constructively aligned.
We have taken numerous opportunities to showcase our work and thinking and have received interest from other universities (for example the University of Exeter) to use the ESCAPE toolkit for curriculum development activity. Professor Chris Rust (Oxford Brookes University) used our ESCAPE resources to support an assessment and feedback workshop at Kingston University.
The University of Hertfordshire is currently running a one year (September 2010 – August 2011) assessment project that is being influenced by the experiences gained from the ESCAPE Project.
A short video detailing the ESCAPE project at the University of Hertfordshire. It gives a snapshot of the project one year in and includes two stakeholder voices.
Project outputs
The ouputs listed below collectively form the ESCAPE Toolkit, a resource pack which details the processes and activities, including insights into critical success factors and guidance for implementation of the ESCAPE approach to supporting assessment practices .
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