ESCAPE themes - student focus

The ESCAPE (Assessment for Learning) themes have been synthesised from the literature. Indeed purposely draw on the literature to create the questions that prompt teachers to think about their assessment design in light of the six ESCAPE themes.

But the design is only one facet of good assessment. The role of the students also needs to be considered. Sure, the design should stimulate appropriate student behaviors etc. but we wanted to go further.

What we are working on now, is a set of 'accessing questions' for our ESCAPE themes that are explicitly written for students. We have the same themes (of course) but the accessing questions are different. Although, we have not tested the ideas out yet, I wanted to share some of our current thinking. Comments, questions, thoughts, most welcome.


Good Practice in Assessment-For-Learning:
Engages students with the assessment criteria
Assessment is an important aspect of student learning and should be used to help reinforce the expected standards. Our interactions with students, through assessment and feedback, should help students engage with the assessment criteria.

Q1.1 I seek out opportunities to help me understand the academic standards expected of Higher Education.
Q1.2 I take advantage of the resources available (across UH) to ensure my work meets the academic standards expected of me.
Q1.3 When presented with an assessment task I read and ensure I correctly understand the assessment criteria
Q1.4 When I receive feedback on my work I look at my feedback and link it back to the assessment criteria to support my future learning
Q1.5 I ensure my assessment submission responds to all the assessment criteria / learning outcomes described in the assessment briefing documents

In what ways do you engage with the assessment criteria?


Good Practice in Assessment-For-Learning:
Supports personalised learning
Students have their own motivations and interests. As individuals, students also have differing needs to support their learning. Whilst individual assessment tasks are likely to be an impractical proposition it is helpful to consider how assessment can support the personalisation of learning.

Q2.1 Where appropriate, I use my own personal experiences to support my assessment submissions.
Q2.2 I take opportunities to let my lecturer know about the areas I would like feedback on (strengths and weaknesses).
Q2.3 I take advantage of any assessment choices presented to me to suit my learning preferences (topic/weighting/timing/criteria).
To finish!
In what ways do seek out opportunities for personalised learning?


Good Practice in Assessment-For-Learning:
Ensures feedback leads to improvement
Feedback is an essential aspect of assessment activity. Feedback will be more effective if it is prompt and makes sense to the students. Moreover, good feedback provides a commentary on the students’ submissions, offers advice on how the work could be developed and provides opportunities for students to demonstrably engage with the feedback.

Q3.1 I recognise the many ways that feedback is presented to me about my work and my learning
Q3.2 I know when and where feedback on my assessment is available and pick up my feedback as soon as it is released.
Q3.3 I take opportunities to discuss feedback with my lecturers and my peers.
Q3.4 I take the time to identify (by myself and / or with my peers) the strengths and weaknesses of my own assessment.
Q3.5 I use feedback from previous assessment tasks to help me improve my understanding and my next assessment task

In what ways do you ensure that the feedback leads to your improvement?



Good Practice in Assessment-For-Learning:
Focuses on student development
Assessment has a significant influence on student motivation and the ways in which students approach their learning. Good assessment develops the students’ interests, motivations and encourages appropriate study behaviours. Ultimately good assessment motivates good learning.

Q4.1 When constructing my assessment submission I focus my effort on learning (i.e. linking concepts together) rather than just remembering information.
Q4.2 When I receive feedback on my assessment I look carefully at the comments, advice and encouragement and do not just concentrate on the marks I received
Q4.3 I take the time to review my own assessment (self assessment) before and after I submit my work
Q4.4 I make sure I identify the positive aspects of my own work as well as areas for improvement

In what ways do you ensure your activity focuses on the development of your learning?


Good Practice in Assessment-For-Learning:
Stimulates dialogue
A good learning environment considers the individual student whilst also recognising the importance of a learning community. Further, learning is enhanced if students are able to share their conceptions and misconceptions. Good assessments support the development of a learning community and provide opportunities for students to engage in a dialogue about their learning.

Teachers too should have an opportunity to engage in a dialogue. A dialogue that helps them shape their teaching and engage in staff, module and programme development activity.

Q5.1. I take every opportunity to contribute to group and class discussions relating to assessment and learning.
Q5.2. I look for opportunities to discuss my assessment with my peers and my teachers
Q5.3 I look for other sources of help to support my assessment. This might include reading lists, learning groups, central support systems etc.
Q5.4. I use the assessment tasks (and subsequent feedback) to help me develop my understanding of the standards expected of me
Q5.5. I always read the feedback I receive and use it to help me shape my learning

In what ways do you engage in dialogue about your learning and assessment activity


Good Practice in Assessment-For-Learning:
Considers student and staff effort
Good assessments create a good educational experience. Good assessment set out high expectations, foster appropriate study behaviours and stimulate students’ inquisitiveness, motivation and interest. Good assessment should distribute the students’ effort across the study-period and topic areas. Good assessments will demand an appropriate amount of student effort. Good assessments will not, however overload students nor their teachers. Good assessments ensure there is adequate time for teachers to create and deliver feedback in ways that supports student learning.

Q6.1. I put all my assessment deadlines in a diary/online calendar so that I am aware of what is expected of me
Q6.2 I plan my work so that I am able to work on assessment tasks that have overlapping deadlines
Q6.3. I avoid cramming and spread out my time on assessment tasks
Q6.4 I follow the advice given (on the assignment briefing document) regarding how much time I should typically spend on my assessment activity
Q6.5 For each assessment task I carefully plan each stage of the work (e.g. reviewing previous feedback, reading/research for new assignment, creating a first draft, reviewing and amending, proof reading, self evaluation, submission)

In what ways do you plan and manage your effort to enhance your learning?


Again, comments / thought / questions most welcome.

Mark

Mapping the assessment landscape

Initial activity of the ESCAPE project related to us 'mapping the assessment landscape'.

The following demonstrates our activity and offers the idea as a concept to help you in your explorations

Mapping educational effectiveness and resource efficiency

One of the instruments we used to engage our ESCAPE partners was a simple two-dimensional matrix. The matrix has axis for educational effectiveness and resource efficiency.

we found this to be a valuable tool to work with our partners in developing better educative assessments that are not overly demanding on their time. The following video sets out the matrix.

Feedback

We have sought numerous opportunities to collect feedback throughout our project and not just at its end. In fact, we are awash with data and feedback. It will be a real challenge to use the data and feed it into our final evaluation. We have so many threads of activity and so many things we would want to share.

But I do want to post here one of the observations made by one of our ESCAPE partners. In many ways the quote captures everything we're trying to do. Support our partners, help them with their practice and allow them to take the work we are doing with them into other modules. i..e Spreading the learning and benefit.

The quote came from a conversation between our ESCAPE partners and was not solicited in any way. You can imagine my scrabble for a pen and paper!

The ESCAPE project has made me think about the way I give feedback and it has changed my practice in all modules.

She went on to say that

I now organise myself such that I am able to give feedback straight away. I now plan my diary around large coursework to free up 2-3 and re-arrange teaching sessions so that I can get a chance to give feedback.

Arguably, the above quotes demonstrate the transformative nature of the project and shows that the learning and benefit is not constrained to the modules we are working with.


Great stuff!

Off to Scotland

Helen Barefoot and I were invited by the HEA to talk run a workshop on assessment and feedback at an all day Assessment event at the Robert Gordon University. What follows is a collection of (very quick) thoughts on the day …

Helen and I have run a few workshops together (inside UH) and so it was just great to take our work (much of which is guided by our ESCAPE activity) to colleagues outside UH. For various reasons the workshop did not run :-(. Despite our disappointment we did get to hear some great assessment related presentations.

Dai Hounsell presented a really grounded key-note and, in fact covered, much of what we were covering too. That assessment is not a new challenge, that good assessment is planned activity and that good assessment stimulates learning. We did not need the NSS to get us thinking that assessment is important. Some really useful slides from Dai that I will explore and come back to in a later post. Great start to the day.

A couple of student perspective presentations followed.
A student led campaign that successful introduced a turn-around-time policy for coursework and interestingly a policy to provide feedback on examination scripts. The learning gains to be had from providing feedback on examination scripts seems rather limited to me. I’m always banging-on about feedback creating consequences, and I’m just not convinced I know what consequences flow, or are able to flow, from feedback on end-of-process, high stakes assessment tasks. That’s a post for another day. But just to say, I’m off the fence on this one. I just don’t get it. Another delegate did note they had a similar policy at his institution and only 15% of the scripts (with feedback) were picked up. Surely we would be better placed putting our feedback on work that will be picked up and more importantly attended to, by the students. And relax!

Steve Draper, engaging as ever, had a couple of threads running through his presentation. First, was the interesting anomaly that overall a department was rated 5th against other departments (107 in total) for the NSS question overall, I am satisfied with the quality of the course and yet questions relating to feedback were ranked much lower. Feedback on my work has been prompt (ranked 54/107), Feedback on my work has helped me clarify things I did not understand (ranked 79/107) have received detailed comments on my work (ranked 101/107). Steve asked us to explore what might be going on. Was there a complex weighting algorithm for all the items on the NSS? Should the individual items of the NSS not sum to the overall score? If not, what was missing, what was the missing ingredient? Second, Steve separated declarative and procedural learning and pondered as to where our efforts on providing feedback might prove most effective. i.e. might we get more learning from less or (better targeted) feedback?

ESCAPE – surfacing and using existing technologies.

A few years back I developed a technology rich assessment programme. The approach to assessment uses technology to create, collect, mark and provide feedback on student-unique, Weekly Assessed Tutorial Sheets (WATS). The WATS approach to assessment was developed to support my own engineering undergraduates but has also been used and influenced practice elsewhere - both inside and outside the university.

The ESCAPE project provided another opportunity to showcase the WATS approach to assessment and debate how it might respond to the challenges of the ESCAPE partner schools.

Due to the ESCAPE project, the School of Life Sciences are now engaging with WATS. In addition to using the WATS approach to assessment in ways which we already know supports students‘ learning,, the School of Life Sciences have put a new twist on its use. The School of Life Sciences are using WATS to set tasks in IBMAP – a core module taken by many students. The students tackle weekly tasks and are presented with prompt and personalised feedback. Additionally, the students’ performance data is fed to the students’ personal tutors. Now the students study profiles, and performance form a useful part of the pastoral care conversations. Although not specifically developed to support pastoral care, the nature of the data that flows form the WATS approach to assessment suggests it can readily be used, not only to support learning and shape teaching, but provide early warning signs of struggling students.


I will keep you posted of how the WATS approach to assessment shapes up in the IBMAP.

Cluster Meeting

We have just returned from our latest CAMEL meeting with our three cluster partners - The Universities of Bristol, Exeter and Westminster. The meeting was hosted by the team from Westminster at their New Cavendish Street site, and as usual was held over two days. One of the most important aspects of these meetings is the chance to meet colleagues and to share our experiences of how our projects are going.

The first day consisted of a couple of really informative session on change management followed by a computer simulation exercise which involved guiding a change management through to completion. Needles to say it started to get quite competitive with teams eager to claim victory. The simulation was in many respects quite realistic and mirrored some of the issues that arise in the ESCAPE project.

The evening was spent catching up with the experiences of the other teams and mapping out the coming year. Plans for the joint JISC Curriculum D&D Programme Meeting in October were discussed over a very pleasant evening meal with the other teams.

On the second day we were asked to give a short presentation on the progress we have made - specifically looking at pedagogical tools that we had developed.The University of Bristol team demonstrated their eBiolabs project . They have developed an interactive online laboratory manual that is designed to prepare and support students through their practical work. The resource being developed is an excellent one and builds on previous work done by the chemists at Bristol, who had a similar project.The link to eBiolabs is http://www.bristol.ac.uk/ebiolabs/ and is well worth a look.

We were able to talk about our experiences at Hertfordshire and the kinds of approaches that we have taken. We outlined the progress made and mapped out how we saw the next six months as the new assessment landscape is bedded in.

Due to building work being carried out at Exeter we will be hosting the next CAMEL meeting which is scheduled for around April 2010.

Now the hard work really starts!

At present I am in the process of meeting with the module co-coordinators to flesh out their plans for re-engineering their assessment regime. This picks up from the work done in July in the assessment re-engineering workshops that we ran. This was a chance for the module teams to reflect on their current practice and to start to apply some of the Appreciative Inquiry techniques that we have been looking at. This includes using reflective interviews to tease out what works well on the module and use this as a basis for the review of the assessments.We are also using "Fish bone Analysis" as a tool to get the teams to see what needs to occur for the re-engineering to happen.

Rachel Harris from Inspire Research has worked with the project team over the last year on the AI approach - acting in a consultancy role. Rachel lead a couple of the sessions at our two day event and writes about her experience in her blog http://www.inspire-research.co.uk/blog.html

I have just finished the draft interim report for the project. This is a good chance for us to reflect on the progress made over the last year with the project. It is quite sobering to think that we are halfway through the life of the project - now we are at the really exciting stage where we can really start to influence the assessment practice in the schools.

Casting Bread On The Water.................

Yesterday afternoon we went live with the student assessment survey. We emailed all students registered on the nine modules that we are working with, to invite them to fill in the survey. The university exam period only ended last Friday . We were unsure when students would log on again to pick up their university emails after their post exam celebrations and the consequent recuperation period ! When I checked this morning there were 51 responses already! many students have given quite detailed feedback on their assessment experience , filling out the optional parts of the survey with their thoughts and suggestions. Lets hope that this level of response continues.This data is really important - along with the module case studies, it will provide us with the information to ensure the assessment benchmarking exercise is as comprehensive as it can be.

Regarding our two day event - one of our module teams is having difficulty making the dates - 21 and 22 July, so we are looking to have a separate event . This module is the most complex in terms of the delivery and assessment modes and has the largest module team. It is a Bio Science double credit module that encompasses three different areas of science.

Correspondence with Steve Draper

Following Steve Draper’s presentation at the HEA Assessment and Feedback day we have been passing emails back to one another. Steve is a great thinker and a really energising presenter. Go listen to him whenever you get the chance.

Two things came up in the correspondence.

1. The difference in the use of ppt between Steve and I. Steve amplified and told wonderfully engaging stories about the words he had on his slides. (I tend to shy away from .ppt slides that are littered with just text) and my talking over pictures. We also presented our ESCAPE activity and we wanted to help capture the attention of the delegates and thought a visual stimulus might help. We overlaid animations on graphs since we wanted delegates to really understand what we were talking about - I think the animations helped us do that (I hope) – it was just after lunch too – and I am aware I can be a tad soporific!

We discussed the usefulness of .ppt slides after such an event. With my approach it would be particularly difficult for anyone that wasn’t there to ‘get’ what I was showing. I am aware of this but also wondered how many people actually revisit the slides after such an event. Steve has a simple solution to this and brings a ready-made, single-sided hand out. The hand out comprises useful refs and links.

2. The second point we batted about, and of more relevance here, is the approach you take to engage staff in re-engineering activity. I am talking here about re-engineering curricula and in relation to ESCAPE re engineering and rethinking the assessment activities.

Although slightly extreme we discussed the merits of small steps of change versus big-bang change. It will be of little surprise that we both converged on the notion that both have something to offer.

With small steps of change …

It is more likely to keep staff engaged and on board i.e. in a way we are showing that we value what staff do but help to nudge things along (to be more educational effective and resource efficient) in a way that is both manageable and supportive.

For some staff a big-bang approach might wrench from under their feet everything they thought was good about their work. I wonder too if a step-wise approach is a great conversation starter and less threatening. Small-steps might prepare staff for some fun big-bang stuff and also develop their scholarship in a risk managed way.

The problem with small steps of change is that often you might never get to the heart of the problem. You tinker, fiddle on the edges, and whilst you might be adding incremental enhancements to a system / assessment (curriculum design approach), the approach /system / curricula you are tinkering with might actually need dropping!

Big-bang gives a great chance to ‘really’ explore the fundamental issue, establish a vision and help set out a curricular that responds to that vision.

We are doing both with ESCAPE and will look at how personalities as well as features of the modules/assessment arrangements best suit the alternatives.

Watch this space!

Curriculum Design Toolkit

Although I am the ESCAPE Project Director I only (officially) get to work on the project for 0.2 of my time The other 0.8 is dedicated to my role as the Deputy of the Blended Learning Unit (BLU). In the 0.8 capacity part of my remit is to lead a team of seconded staff in the area of Curriculum Design and Innovation (CDI)

Some of the CDI team are currently working on developing a Curriculum Design Toolkit. The toolkit has three components and is intend to help individuals, module teams and programme teams reflect on, and where appropriate re-engineer, their curricula. The primary components of the toolkit are

A Diagnostic tool – used to establish where the problems in the curricula might lay
A Features and Consequences map – used to show what the ‘features and consequences’ of the diagnosed curricula are likely to be.
A Suggestions for Improvement resource bank – used to provide staff with different forms of advice should they wish to tackle any diagnosed problems

Wednesday and Thursday of this week I drew the team together to review progress and accelerate the development. The team are only seconded the BLU on a fractional basis and so they too have many varied demands placed on them.

The two days was full of energy and enthusiasm for the development.
After I outlined the vision for the toolkit and fed back initial thoughts from users of a pilot Diagnostic tool day one was set aside for the team to show where they are at.

Marija Cubric outlined the Technology-to-Principles Matrix. Given that UH is wedded to the notion of Blended Learning there is a need for us to help staff make appropriate decisions about the use of the varied technologies available. For us it is never ‘the answer is a wiki, now what was the question?’

Following Marija’s presentation / discussion we spent the rest of the day exploring the progress of the various CD strands.

Currently the strands under development are ‘Curriculum Design Toolkits for…

* Core values (Here we use the Principles of Good Practice in Undergraduate Education offered by Chickering and Gamson)

* Employability – this development is being led by Amanda (Mandi) Relph and Sarah Flynn

* Research Informed Teaching – this development is being led by Phil Porter

* Assessment for Learning – this development is being led by Maria Banks and Myself

Other strands to be developed include

* Internationalisation
* Entrepreneurship


The Diagnostic tool offers a set of research informed principles to the user. The Principles are different for each strand.

Each of the Principles are accessed separately by five questions. The Diagnostic tool rates the responses to the questions and shows, graphically, if there is good, or other, alignment with each of the Principles. We spent the whole of Wednesday looking at the Principles and the ‘accessing questions’.


Wednesday was really productive and we moved on our developments and thinking significantly. Wednesday also included a trip out to a local Indian Restaurant. It was great to continue the discussions as well spend some time socialising with colleagues.

Thursday was due to be a testing day. We were hoping (somewhat ambitiously) to get other members of the BLU / LTI to test the toolkits under different scenarios. Alas we were just too ambitious and so we stood the ‘testers’ down.

We continued with our work from Wednesday and also spent part of the day engaging with students. This was to incorporate their voice into the Features and Consequences Map. We thought getting the students involved would be a valuable contribution. I’m not sure any of us knew just how valuable that activity was going to be. We took input from Lauren Anderson and Elizabeth Terry (placement students in the BLU), Yoeri Goosens – BLU Student Consultant, Ruth Hyde – BLU research assistant recently engaged in the JISC funded STROLL project and Dawn Hamlet. Dawn is our link with the UH student Union. We have worked with this group before and they are always dedicated and committed. Thank you!

Each of the strand leaders met separately with the students to get the student view. It was really interesting to see how the strand leaders engaged the students differently. I suspect the different facilitation techniques kept the students alert too. That is they were not overwhelmed by the same technique.


Gaining the voice of the student was followed by a super-efficient and dialogic facilitation technique (Marija Cubric) to get us to vote on the likely ability of the various technologies to meet the needs of the various Principles.

We came a long way in those two days and although we are left with some on-going activity I doubt we would have so far if we had stayed in our offices and worked on the toolkits on an ad-hoc basis.

Oh, why am I writing this here? Mainly because of the Assessment-for-Learning strand that is being developed. It will be just great to get this and the Technology-to-Principles matrix fed into ESCAPE.

Watch this space…

Great job team!

A few thoughts from Prof. Brenda Smith. HEA Assessment and Feedback Event

Brenda, as always, presents a really coherent argument and draws on a wealth of experience and expertise. Brenda’s position allows her to talk with numerous institutions which subsequently feed back into her knowledge. She uses these examples really well to allow her to provide some concrete examples of practice in the sector.

A few things I wrote down from her presentation …

* Engage students in the planning and curriculum planning – students can be great change agents.
* Assessments ‘can’ be set at week 3
* Get the Heads of Academic Schools at Teaching and Learning sessions – get T&L valued.
* Policies of professorship for T&L not valued or limited take up?
* A student friendly academic School gives a higher student feedback return
* The University of Lincoln, provides a booklet relating to students’ feedback. The booklet includes ‘this is what you asked for, this is what you said, and this is what we did. Helen and I are trying to get a You Said – We Did campaign up and running at UH. This resonated with us.
* Staff taking students to lunch and other simple schemes that attempt to engage students with staff. This again reminds me of Chickering and Gamson’s first principle ‘ Good practice im undergraduate education encourages staff student contact.
* Too much feedback might not be helpful
* Don’t just respond to students’ needs – Brenda gave the example of groups work and students not wanting it– Don’t forget to tell them why you are using it and what the purposes are. It’s not a secret!
* Stratchlyde – podcast lectures and use lecture time more productively – this frees up time for better feedback – This reminds me of what we do with the Blended Learning - use the technology o enhance and extend the traditional teaching sessions.
* Use of voice – audio supported feedback
* What do students do with feedback?
* Useful ways of presenting feedback – quickly!

Lots and lots more really useful ideas - I'm sure I've only touched the surface and dine an injustice to Brenda's session.

Hurrah for Herts. HEA Assessment and Feedback Event

The HEA event on Assessment and Feedback (1 April 2009) provided a great opportunity to hear from some A&F experts I was flattered too to get an invite to present the work of the ESCAPE project. Thanks for the invite Eddie Gulc :-) The invite provided an opportunity to raise the profile of the ESCAPE project as well as raise the profile of UH. It was just great too to hear other speakers also refer to the good work of UH. Andy Gillett and Angela Hammond’s map of the assessment profile was raised by Prof. Brenda Smith and so too was our CABLE activity.

Thanks for the helping us fly-the-UH-flag..

Final Version of Project Plan to JISC

We have just submitted our " final version" as opposed to "draft version" of our project plan. the plan was revised in the light of comments received from our colleagues at JISC and from the steering group. The Plan is now quite a hefty document - including the work packages it runs to 48 pages. We have revised some of our time lines. In particular we have allowed much longer for the design and development of the assessments for learning phase. The modules we are working with are a mix of one and two semesters long. The single semester modules will run between October 2009 and February 2010 - which means in March we will have an idea of how well our redesign has worked.

This week we are starting to apply our appreciative inquiry methods to the school of Life Sciences. We are conducting interviews with members of the module teams. This will allow us to get to know each other and start the inquire phase of the Appreciative Inquiry method. We will be asking them about good learning experiences they have encountered. We will be exploring what was it that made it a good experience. with questions such as:

• what happened?
• who was involved?
• what was your part in the experience?
• what was it that made it possible?

Using these reflections we will to start to evaluate the assessment practices of the modules. We will be looking to establish a way of evaluating the assessment against efficiency and effectiveness.

ESCAPE coverage in the Universe

Hi there, my name is Elizabeth Terry and I am a Business Studies student currently on placement with the Blended Learning Unit/ Learning and Teaching Institute (BLU/LTI). Working in such a committed learning environment, I have come to realise just how much the BLU/LTI value the students' opinion. Before working here, I had no idea how much thought went into enhancing the student experience, particularly within the classroom. Because of this, I have decided to do all that I can to make the students fully aware of what activities we do and the benefits that they bring to not only the university, but also their studies.

Liaising closely with Dawn Hamlet (Vice President Academic Support and Campaigns), I have successfully been able to get numerous stories on various projects that the BLU/LTI are running into the Universe (the student’s paper that has on average 4,000 readers). This week, the Universe features a story on the ESCAPE project. The article highlights concerns that are attached to assessment and invites the students to give their opinion and views on assessment and feedback.

All roads lead to ESCAPE

Peter Bullen and I have been invited to act as guest editors for a special edition of Engineering Education. Engineering Education is the Journal of the Higher Education Engineering Subject Centre. We were approached (I suspect) since we are engineers, are passionate about engineering Education and because we are Director and Deputy Director of the Blended Learning Unit (respectively).

The focus of the special edition is technology supported engineering
education. See the fit?

We were overwhelmed with the response, it far exceeded our expectations and I suspect it exceeded the expectations of the Subject Centre :-) Naturally we then had the pleasure of reading the proposals. This 'pleasure' IS genuine since I'm always interested to hear and read about colleagues activity. Although we are guest-editing the regular editorial team are still in place to support us. I had a lengthy telephone conversation today regarding the proposals and how we move forward from here.

Some things that came from the conversation included ...

* What to do with a great proposal that exceeded the word limit?
* How it was comforting when the 5 independent reviewers agreed on the outcome of many of the proposals
* How it was frustrating when we didn't.
* How we can be encouraging yet maintain the standards of the Journal

Sure, much of this relates to the Journal but it really struck a chord with me since we were essentially assessing the proposals for suitability for inclusion in the journal. And many of the issues really relate to assessment per se.

* Congruence of mark / feedback - i.e. reliability of assessment
* Engagement with the rules
* Sharing and maintaining standards


Seems like wherever I look nowadays I see assessment and activity related to ESCAPE.