Teaching intervention: final report

AIMS
I aimed to investigate how to achieve:
• a greater student understanding of essay style coursework requirements and particularly accompanying assessment criteria
• better performance on essay style coursework
• an understanding of whether students transfer this greater understanding to other courseworks.

Specific research questions addressed:
• Would development of a dialogue between tutor and students assist a greater understanding of assessment criteria in essays set?
• Would the use of peer and self assessment help this process of improving understanding of assessment criteria?
• Would active engagement of students in reviewing past exemplars of student essays help this process of understanding assessment criteria?
• Would a greater understanding of assessment criteria improve performance?
• Would students be able to ‘feed forward’ into future courseworks from past experience and demonstrate a reflection on their work to improve performance?

SCOPE
I undertook this intervention with Accountancy undergraduate students on:
• two honours level modules with an eight-week common teaching period in term 1. The modules were Advanced Corporate Reporting (ACR) and Evaluating Corporate Reports (ECR)
• a discursive area covering accounting theories underpinning practices in accounting
• 66 students, most of whom took part in the first stages of the process; the full process of intervention was carried out on ECR module with 18 students. .