Conference and seminar sessions in Evaluation of teaching
→ More specific
Acquiring actionable student feedback in real time through graded questionnaires
Presentation at DEE 2021,Introducing CORE’s The Economy — Evaluating students’ exam performance
Presentation at DEE 2017,CORE Economics provides novel material for teaching first year undergraduate economics. Since its launch in 2013, the CORE e-book has attracted significant interest from all sides of the economic spectrum. A question often asked, however, is how easily the material can be integrated in an existing curriculum and how well students perform in subsequent years. Some simple descriptive statistics suggest that, compared to previous cohorts, CORE students from a major UK Higher Education institution have on average performed better than non-CORE cohorts. This project aims to establish a causal link between second year performance and having had CORE economics in year 1 using regression analysis. Our aim is to perform a Difference in Difference estimation, comparing the performance of those second year students which have been exposed to the CORE course with those joint degree students who have taken first year economics at other places.
Learning Gain and Confidence Gain as Metrics for Pedagogical Effectiveness
Presentation at DEE 2017,This presentation details the most recent results and outputs of an HEFCE funded pedagogical research project aimed at investigating the concept of ‘learning gain’ as a measure of pedagogical effectiveness. Our approach originates from the principle that students ought to develop positive self-efficacy beliefs as they progress over their academic journey. We re-enforce this concept by suggesting that student confidence should represent a learning outcome in its own right. In other words, we claim that the development of student self-efficacy should: (i) run parallel to every academic curriculum, and (ii) be subject to assessment and evaluation, along with the accumulation of knowledge, practical, and critical skills. To achieve this objective, we design and evaluate a pedagogical approach where students and staff can promote and track the simultaneous formation of learning gain and confidence gain. In the first part of the presentation we describe our teaching approach, which combines pedagogies such as self-assessment and peer-Instruction, to facilitate the creation of an active learning environment for a large-class undergraduate module in Introductory Macroeconomics. In the second part of the presentation we introduce our definitions of learning gain and confidence gain. Thus, we describe how these definitions can be employed to develop an evidence-based evaluation of our teaching approach. We argue that a comprehensive appraisal of teaching quality should evaluate learning gain in relation to measures of student self-assessment skills and self-efficacy beliefs. Therefore, we investigate the interplay of these metrics to assess pedagogical effectiveness.
How should we measure the quality of an economics degree?
Panel at DEE 2017,In Economics, we've been trying for years to sketch out the outline of what an economics degree should look like in terms of skills acquired (for e.g. in terms of the QAA content guidelines developed a few years ago) but more importantly how one would measure whether a specific programme achieves this. In light of this, I am proposing a panel to bring together representatives from various UK universities to discuss this. The idea is to make this the first step of a bigger project whereby a common structure of evaluating the degree is developed over time and institutions can opt in to use this evaluation if they wish. Assessment options could range from a TUCE-like test as used in the US, which is taken at the start of the programme and at the end to measure value-added, to a portfolio approach, where students will need to have produced a variety of outputs over the course of the programme.
