John Hedley, Senior Lecturer in the School of Engineering, explains how his module’s NUMBAS exam assesses students’ effort during the module, by giving them the opportunity to see, practise and ask for advice on all exam questions prior to taking the exam, and in the process developing a deep understanding of the module’s learning outcomes.
Dr John Hedley, Senior Lecturer in the School of Engineering, designed a marking criteria for a team of markers on a large population engineering module, enabling fast and consistent marking, alongside effective descriptive student feedback that is automatically generated.
In this case study Dr Vicky Fawcett, Research Associate in Astrophysics, describes how Newcastle, Durham and Northumbria Universities collaborated to design a hugely successful astronomy exhibition at the Great North Museum, with the aim of getting more children from low socioeconomic backgrounds, as well as their families and the wider local community, interested in STEM subjects.
PGR colleagues Jerome Ruddick and Elly Polignano designed a wellbeing workshop to tackle mental health issues within academia for PGRs both within Newcastle’s History, Classics and Archaeology department, and beyond, in other northern universities.
In this case study Jerome discusses how a hands-on, creative pottery making activity became a highly successful part of the workshop, creating a calming environment providing mental and physical respite, allowing PGR students to disassociate from their own thoughts, engage with their peers, and practice self-evaluation by engaging with wellbeing questions on a deep level.
Dr Chris Graham, Director of Digital Learning in Maths, Stats and Physics, explains how he uses the Q&A functionality in Vevox as a channel for student questions during lectures, how he has refined his approach to responding to questions during the lecture, and how students have reacted positively to the option to ask questions anonymously.
Dr John Holton, Senior Lecturer in Ancient History, describes designing a poster assignment for his stage 2 module that builds and tests diverse skill-sets, promotes student engagement by enabling students to self-select and then personally research their choice of topic, resulting in students showing an increased assessment confidence and unusually high engagement with the task.
Lana Liu, Senior Lecturer in Accounting and Finance in NUBS and Mei Lin, Senior Lecturer in Applied Linguistic in ECLS describe how they developed a critical learning skills (CLS) framework, which identifies critical moments in students’ learning journey and pedagogical strategies focusing on knowledge application and critical evaluations and helps inform critical thinking (CT) in curriculum design.
Dr Stephanie Holton, Senior Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History, explains how students used AI generative tools to create visual representations of self-chosen textual sources, and how the software enabled students who struggle with confidence in their drawing skills to produce striking visual images, by allowing them to focus on the content of the text rather than on artistic ability.
Dr Angela Mazzetti from NUBS explains her partnership work with Liv Jonassen of the Academic Skills Team from the Library to produce engaging and informative assessment support videos on the subject of designing infographics for BUS2040, resulting in an improvement in student achievement, and increased confidence when engaging with the assessment.
John Holton, Director of Education in HCA explains how student demand for clarity on navigating the PEC process led him to develop a bespoke, student-facing infographic, re-packaging important information and key take-aways in an engaging and easy to understand format, resulting in a reduction in student anxiety, increasing confidence in the process, and reducing workload for staff responding to queries.