Assessing Key Skills

1. Assessing Key Skills Short Course This document is licensed under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 UK: England & Wales license, available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/.

2. Learning Outcomes • On completion of the course, participants are expected to be able to: • Describe how key skills can be integrated into teaching, learning and assessment on their courses. • Design assessment tasks for key skills.

3. What are key skills? • An ability to do something • Underlie a wide range of activities

4. Why develop key skills? • Employability • To improve academic work • To develop students as people

5. Employability • Why are we teaching? • What do students expect? • Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA): Destination of Leavers

6. To improve academic work • “UCL's Learning and Teaching Strategy … is designed to ensure that students … acquire (in an explicit sense) …subject-specific and key skills and gain experience which will equip them either for further study or for entry to employment.” (UCL’s Assessment Strategy)

7. To improve academic work • Descriptor for a Bachelors degree: “holders will have: the qualities and transferable skills necessary for employment requiring: - the exercise of initiative and personal responsibility decision-making in complex and unpredictable contexts - the learning ability needed to undertake appropriate further training of a professional or equivalent nature.” (Quality Assurance Agency, QAA)

8. To develop students as people • UCL aims to develop ‘global citizens’ who are: • Critical and creative thinkers • Ambitious – but also idealistic and committed to ethical behaviour • Aware of the intellectual and social value of culture difference • Entrepreneurs with the ability to innovate • Willing to assume leadership roles: in the family, the community and the workplace • Highly employable and ready to embrace professional mobility. (UCL Education for Global Citizenship)

9. The UCL Key Skills Gridhttp://www.ucl.ac.uk/keyskills/resources/Grid • Academic Skills • Self-management skills • Communication skills • Interpersonal skills

10. Integrating key skills into learning • Problem-based • Project-based • Research-based • Enquiry-based

11. Constructive Alignment Teacher perspective: Objectives Teaching activities Assessment Student perspective: Assessment Learning activities Outcomes (Biggs, 2003, Teaching for Quality Learning at University, p. 141).

12. Constructive Alignment “3.1 The fundamental principles of UCL's assessment strategy are: • to recognise and enhance students' learning, capabilities and skills…” (UCL’s Assessment Strategy).

13. Introduction Case Study: Electrical Engineering

14. Case Study: Electromagnetic weight lifting A company hired a mechanical engineering design firm to produce battery powered electromagnetic lifting coupling to integrate into their remote controlled robotic crane. Unfortunately the magnet produced did not provide sufficient lifting force. At this stage in the design process of the robot it is too late to change the mechanical design or the battery type (either a 1.5V C or 9V. You have been contracted to redesign the coil of the electromagnet to maximise the lifting force. • Goal • To lift the most weight • Constraints • Mechanical design • Two battery types • Validation • Weight lifting competition • Essentially an optimisation problem • Need to determine and apply theory to produce a mathematical model • Some parameters need to be determined experimentally • The optimum solution determined by the model is then constructed and tested

15. Scenario Project Model Case Study: Scenario Project Model Concept & organisational approval? Design approval? Specification Met? Checkpoints

16. Case Study: Feedback and Assessment • Assessment • Formative • Checkpoints • Competitions • Summative • Group Presentations • Individual technical reports • Traditional reports • Critical Assessments of other teams solutions • Group technical report • User manual • Due diligence document • Individual Narratives • Feedback • Regular facilitation sessions • Reports are submitted and marked online in moodle, feedback and comments provided by using ‘comment’ in word and a marking pro forma • Post scenario debrief session

17. Assessing Key Skills Learning and assessing: the skating metaphor If you want to learn to skate, you start skating. Your teacher gives you skating tasks to improve your skating. You practise them. If you want to assess someone’s skating you give them a skating task and watch them skating. In a formal setting, you grade their skating according to a set of assessment criteria.

18. Building on the skating metaphor: a scenario Students will be doing oral presentations for part of the summative assessment on a course To prepare, they need to practise oral assessment tasks and get feedback on their skills They need to develop their presentation skills so they can fulfil the assessment criteria for the summative assessment task

19. Over to you… • Consider which key skills are or can be integrated into your module. (See key skills grid) • Plan teaching and learning activities and assessment (formative and summative), which promote the development of the selected key skills. See assessment tasks in Epstein, http://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJMra054784

20. References J. Biggs. 2003. Teaching for Quality Learning at University. (Maidenhead: The Society for Research into Higher Education and Open University Press). Epstein, R.M., (2007) New England Journal of Medicine. ‘Assessment in Medical Education. 356:4 http://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJMra054784 QAA. 2008 “The framework for higher education qualifications in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.”http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/FHEQ/EWNI08/FHEQ08.pdf Thomsen, B. 2009. ‘Design, Implementation and evaluation of a Scenario Based Learning trial in Electronic and Electrical Engineering.’ Presentation provided by the author: bthomsen@ee.ucl.ac.uk UCL’s Assessment Strategy. http://www.ucl.ac.uk/academic-manual/part-k/k13 UCL’s Education for Global Citizenship. http://www.ucl.ac.uk/global_citizenship/ UCL Key Skills. http://www.ucl.ac.uk/keyskills