Assessment and feedback
During my teaching practice I acquainted myself with the practices of assessment in Oulu university of applied sciences. I could not design the course assessment criteria as it had already been designed by the course teachers and students had been introduced to the assessment criteria at the beginning of the courses before I started. I, however, got acquainted with the methods the teachers use for assessment and I was able to assess some parts of the course and the parts I was teaching.
Course assessment criteria
Below I describe the course assessment criteria for each course I was teaching and the common language assessment criteria in OUAS.
OUAS language competence assessment criteria:
English for energy field engineers
The grading is based on:
- 80 % of tasks in Moodle and promentor.net (digital language learning platform) need to be completed. This equals at least 34 tasks in Moodle out of the 43 tasks, and 20 tasks in Promentor out of the 25.
- Video CV in English
- Energy project presentation and documents
- Written exam
English for mechanical engineers
The grading is based on:
- Regular attendance and active class participation
- Vocabulary quizzes
- Written exam
- Interview
Intercultural Competence course
Grading is based on:
- Own culture presentation
- Cultural dimension
- Lesson participation and learning assignments
- Learning journal
- Written exam
Due to the covid-2019 crisis the written exams are cancelled in all the courses and the final grade will incorporate all the elements but the exam.
Class feedback stages
I plan all my lessons including a lot of pair and group work. Students get pair feedback when comparing each other’s answers. The peer feedback is followed by the open-class feedback session at every stage of the lesson. Open-class feedback stimulates the students to perform the tasks properly and check it consciously with their partners as any individual/pair/group can be called on. When monitoring the class during pair work and feedback and when running open-class feedback I can evaluate how properly the task has been done or not and how good is the understanding of the subject/ language point and whether I need to work on it further with the students. In accuracy-based activities I give immediate feedback when I spot the error during monitoring. In fluency-based activities or pronunciation I perform error correction at the end of the activity or class.
Energy project
One part of the grading of the English for energy engineers’ course is assessing their presentations of the energy project. The students in groups design a project in their substance field in collaboration with one of the companies in the Oulu region. They present the project to their departmental guiding teachers and peers in English. The engineering teachers assess the contents of the project and the English teacher assesses the language skills and the presentation skills.
On the day I was assessing the project there were 12 student groups presenting. There were around 3-4 students in each group. Each student in the group had to be assessed separately on their English skills. I was assessing within the language assessment framework used by English teachers in OUAS for project assessments. The students were assessed in 3 areas: fluency of speech, pronunciation, professional vocabulary. The grade range was from 1-5.
Sometimes it was very challenging to assess the students for two reasons: when presenting in a group not all students spoke. A lot of students read word by word from the presentation slides. In order to be able to hear spontaneous English speech from them I was asking additional questions on the project. Evaluation of this sort was new and rather challenging for me. The tempo of presentations was very fast, and I had to listen to the language, evaluate the language constructions and vocabulary used, look out for mistakes. I also needed to follow the presentation and its contents in order to evaluate the students’ presentation skills and be able to ask further questions in case I didn’t get enough language to assess the language skills. I stayed behind after the end of the presentation session in the classroom for an hour in order to give feedback to the students. Only representatives of 4 groups came to get their feedback. My guiding teacher will use my assessment notes when calculating the final grade at the end of the semester.
Kahoot!
I used Kahoot! in one of the lessons to run a vocabulary quiz from one of the chapters. It worked marvellously. The assessment in a game form was fun and lovely, students seemed to have enjoyed it on a rather different level than a normal vocabulary quiz. After completion of a Kahoot game I could download the report from the application which gives a very detailed information and statistics on how each concrete student did on the quiz. It’s a great tool to continue using in the future as a fun way to assess students’ progress and knowledge.
E-learning-stage
During the covid-19 learning stage I had to use digital tools for monitoring the engagement and the work of my students. I planned my lessons where at certain stages it would be required for students to submit their work to me individually, in pairs or in groups. I used tools such as One Drive, Google Drive, via which students shared documents with their answers for my evaluation. I also used padlet for open class feedback, Facebook to collect answers and run peer evaluation in one of the exercises, and a regular mailbox.
Students’ assessment of my teaching
Not only I was evaluating students’ work, students were evaluating my work as well. I was regularly collecting feedback from my students on the classes I had. I collected feedback on paper and with the help of surveyhero app. The app gives good opportunities for the analysis of the individual responses and a good statistical summary of all the responses. This tool helped me assess my performance and take into consideration comments from the students, which is very valuable.
Feedback form: https://surveyhero.com/c/3a907d37
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