Professor Tansy Jessop

Pro-Vice Chancellor for Education and Students at University of Bristol.

Fostering student agency and engagement in assessment and feedback: taking a programme approach

Abstract

In TESTA data, students routinely describe being overwhelmed by summative assessment. In rushing to complete assessments, they often fail to see their wider purpose and relevance, or to find space and time to shape or take pride in their work. Students say that they struggle to see connections between assessment tasks across the programme, and to trust feedback enough to act on it. Drawing on theories of alienation and engagement, this talk will explore how to design assessment and feedback across programmes that enable students to exercise their agency, play to their strengths, become more curious, deepen their understanding, and surprisingly, have more fun.

Biography

Tansy Jessop is PVC Education and Students at the University of Bristol, where she has led curriculum enhancement across the institution to re-imagine the design of programmes and assessment. Across the sector and working with many programmes in different universities, she has led the ‘Transforming the Experience of Students through Assessment’ (TESTA) research and change project for 15 years. Her recent book ‘Student Agency and Engagement: Transforming Assessment and Feedback in Higher Education’ (

available as an e-copy through The Library) draws on findings from TESTA to show the value of taking a programme approach, offering fresh perspectives of students’ experience of assessment and feedback through theories of alienation and engagement.

Racially inclusive practice in assessment

Abstract

There is a current dearth of critical and empirically substantiated evidence as to what works with regards to equalizing the uneven educative experiences of racialized students in higher education. There are even less empirically substantiated answers to what works with regards to addressing the barriers specifically manifest within HE assessment and related practices that are experienced by domicile students of colour in UK Higher Education Providers (HEPs).

By drawing on the findings of his ground-breaking work leading the first holistic, large-scale, UK, multi-institution and mixed-methods evaluation of an intervention explicitly designed to reduce the racialised barriers that exist within HE assessment, Dr Paul Campbell, inaugural Director of the Leicester Institute for Inclusivity in HE and Associate Professor of Race and Inclusion, explores the answers to these questions. Specifically, the talk shines light on the Racially Inclusive Practice in Assessment Guidance Intervention’s (RIPIAG) impact for improving (1) teaching staff’s ability to identify and reduce the racialised inequities that are manifest in their assessment practice and (2) students from minority-ethnic backgrounds’ experiences of assessment. The talk will also explore RIPIAG’s capacity to foster a reduction in the race award gap in student outcomes in assessment at the module level across all types of assessment in all disciplines.

Biography

Dr Paul Ian Campbell is the Inaugural Director of the Leicester Institute for Inclusivity in Higher Education, a University Distinguished Teaching Fellow and National Teaching Fellow. He developed the Racially Inclusive Curricula Toolkit, the Racially Inclusive Practice in Assessment Guidance and the University of Leicester Race inclusion Action Plan Framework. The RIPAIG is the first intervention in the world to make an empirical reduction in the race award gap across three different universities and the Race Inclusion Action Plan Framework directly contributed to a reported 4% reduction in the race award gap at Leicester in 2024.

He is co-convenor of the Evaluating Teaching in Higher Education Collective and is an Academic Advisor for the Centre for Transforming Assessment and Student Outcomes (TASO). Paul supports a number of UK research and teaching focused universities in addressing racial inequalities in their curricular and in their assessment processes. Paul is a sector leader in developing and evaluating interventions for making HE curricula and assessment racially inclusive and he has published a number of ground-breaking reports on how to empirically move from race inclusion theory to practice.

Paul is also an award winning academic and Associate Professor in the Sociology of race and inclusion.

Dr Paul Campbell

Director of the Leicester Institute for Inclusivity in Higher Education at University of Leicester.