Written by Gillian Ulph and Dr Eleanor Aspey 

This project stemmed from a desire to incorporate student perspectives into an undergraduate programme review in Law which we had been leading from 2020. Due to the pandemic, there had been fewer opportunities to bring students into the initial design but in 2022 we decided to embark on a project looking at assessment and feedback in the programmes which would enable us to review and redesign aspects of the process together with our students.

Our teaching practice and experience as undergraduate Programme Directors had already shown us the importance of providing clarity and support to students throughout the assessment process. Data from course unit evaluations and the NSS, as well as formal and informal discussions with students, highlights the challenges that exist in this area, and research has shown the importance of developing assessment and feedback literacy to ensure that students can reach their potential during their studies and as lifelong learners.

Although the programme and course ILOs and assessments had already been set, we felt that our review of the assessment materials and processes should be student-centred in order to best support future cohorts of students. The challenges of assessment and feedback in higher education are often approached by reviewing anonymous student feedback and scores, or gathering feedback from focus groups and student representatives, but these methods cannot always identify or address misunderstandings between students and staff as to the nature and purpose of assessment and feedback in higher education. Developments in our practice and processes in response to student feedback are often based on what staff think students are telling us and on student misconceptions of the questions being asked or the issues being addressed. We felt that a more collaborative approach, working with students as partners, was likely to inform both student and staff understanding of the issues and offer better insights, so clarifying and improving our practice and processes.

With this in mind, we chose to use the micro-sprint approach developed by John Owen and Catherine Wasiuk to work with students on curriculum design projects. The methodology draws on the Agile Scrum Framework and condenses the traditional Sprint format into shorter periods. These micro-sprints follow a four-stage structure of Plan, Do, Review and Reflect during a 3-hour session to achieve a practical goal. As John and Catherine explain,

Micro-sprints facilitate a productive and transparent team working environment where dialogue and feedback play a central role.

We planned to run four micro-sprints across a fortnight, with an additional introductory training session and a final review session. We advertised to recruit 5 Law students volunteers for each micro-sprint, selected on a first-come, first-served basis, and employed a student intern to support the administration of the project. The entire project was run online to ensure a broad range of students could participate and they were given a voucher per session in recognition of their contribution. In addition, two members of academic staff from Law and an e-Learning technologist formed part of the team for each micro-sprint.

The training session was included to enable students and staff to get to know each other, to set our agreed ways of working and to introduce the concept and aims of micro-sprints. We needed to stress the importance of each of the four stages for each session, in order to achieve the goals and ensure that there is scope to improve, evaluate and develop the team and their practice. Our review session was intended to bring together the different outputs and enable a final reflection on the process, and the students particularly appreciated the opportunity to comment on and edit the materials at this point in order to root out any misunderstandings of points made during the individual micro-sprints.

Our sessions were focused on assessment materials, marking criteria, assessment literacy and feedback literacy, and we were aiming to review and redesign some of the materials and processes for assessment and feedback in Law to better support students. These focused and practical goals, and the timescale we were working with, meant that the micro-sprint methodology seemed to be a valuable model for co-creation for this project.

Overall, both staff and students found this a positive, enjoyable and rewarding experience. We were able to make progress on each of our goals, and the participants gained valuable insights into staff and student perspectives which were captured in the different materials that we produced. We developed good working relationships and shared understandings.

Reflections on micro-sprints

The micro-sprint method was quick and easy to get to grips with for staff and students and worked well as a tool for co-creation in a defined period. The 3-hour period was appropriate for each micro-sprint, despite requiring an intense focus for this time, and the make-up of the teams worked well. It was particularly helpful to have support from a Learning Technologist who could offer an external perspective for each session. The training session was helpful and co-designing the agreed ways of working gave the students confidence in the process and helped to reduce the power imbalance between students and staff, thus addressing some of the common challenges with student partnership projects.

Student feedback on the project echoed many of the staff perspectives. Our intern noted that the project was ‘friendly and dedicated’ and that they could see that ‘students’ sense of participation and motivation about making positive changes to the assessment and feedback system is getting higher and higher’. The participants noted that the project ‘created an environment where everyone could productively communicate their opinions and they were constructively debated’ and that ‘We (as students) felt heard and listened to, as the criticism we had was taken well and when asked for advice or solutions, we were all able to reach a sensible conclusion’.

In retrospect we should have had more tightly defined goals for each session as it was difficult to fully achieve all that we had set out to do. At times we struggled to differentiate the individual stages for each micro-sprint and although we tried to identify one member of the team to be a scrum master to keep the sprint on track, this was tricky because other members of the team weren’t as familiar with the process or the aims of the project. These challenges reflect the tension between policy and pedagogy within partnership projects more generally, as identified in AdvanceHE resources, and we could perhaps have drawn more on existing data to frame the issues in advance.

A particular problem was the lack of a shared understanding about assessment and feedback initially, which meant that a lot of time was taken up addressing this before we could move on to planning and then achieving the specific goals for each session. This was important, as acknowledged by our student participants, but some pre-reading or asynchronous activities might have been helpful for our project and reduced the initial imbalance thus enabling the work to be completed more equitably by all participants.

Given these constraints, we felt that we were reasonably successful in managing the inherent power imbalance between participants. We were pleased that the students found the format comfortable and open and were able to share thoughts even where they were negative or critical, although we felt that sometimes they needed to be encouraged to speak openly with staff. At times the lecturer/student roles were difficult to avoid and there was a tendency for all of us to revert back to a focus group style session which was not the aim.

Although we were committed to the value of working with students as partners, we hadn’t fully appreciated and accounted for the different student perspectives when planning the project. There were of course a range of levels of understanding, approaches to study, experiences of assessment and emotional responses to the issues that we were discussing. We should have thought more carefully about the impact of discussing assessment and feedback at a time when students were themselves waiting for assessment results, and about what the discussions would mean to those continuing with their studies and those at a later stage and who were understandably reflecting on how they could or should have approached their studies differently. We also had to deal with the fact that we were currently marking or had previously taught and assessed many of the students ourselves, and the fact that students wanted to engage in discussions about specific assessments or course units with us. Our shared ways of working, which included a focus on empathy and confidentiality, were helpful here, but discussions about assessment and feedback are always emotive and may need benefit from further consideration than for some other co-creation projects. 

Reflections on co-creation with students

Although neither of us had prior experience of co-creation and working with students as partners, we found this to be a very positive and productive experience. We drew on Advance HE guidance and resources initially, but also benefitted from the support available from the Student Partnership Team and other resources and examples of good practice within the university.

Research shows that the experience of staff working in partnership with students can be a source of rich learning and development for all the partners in a project, as well as achieving positive outcomes in projects, in our case linked to the area of pedagogic consultancy, as defined by AdvanceHE. Our experience supports these claims, and the experience has inspired us to reimagine our practice and incorporate further opportunities for working in partnership with students to support our shared objectives. Overall, the project helped us to better understand the challenges inherent within assessment and feedback but importantly it has also transformed our approach to these areas within our own teaching practice.

Finally, in spirit of student partnership, we conclude with this reflection from one of the student partners:

Not only was I able to voice my long-running concerns about assessments and the resources available to help students with them, but I was able to make a meaningful contribution to the improvements to the assessment and feedback resources that I hope will benefit future law students. It was also a pleasure to collaborate with staff on this project, and to hear their own perspectives on and concerns about the assessment process – before this, myself and my peers felt that there was a real disconnect between students and staff outside of office hours (exacerbated by the online learning conditions brought about by covid) and also that students had very little say on how they wanted their course to be run, but this project has shown that by giving students the opportunity to engage with proposals made by staff and contribute original ideas, improvements can be made that benefit all within the school of law.

With thanks to our student partners (Christian Adair, Shamona Koshy, Wisdom Olujomoye, Tarana Asadova, Nikhil Nair and Xiaofan (Alice) Hong) as well as the Humanities eLearning team, John Owen from the School of Health Sciences and other colleagues from SoSS and the Faculty of Humanities who supported us with this project.

For further guidance on micro-sprints and student partnership by John Owen and other UoM colleagues see:

https://medium.com/student-teaching-engagement-through-partnerships/student-staff-partnerships-a-practical-guide-9a64b5c882c6

https://medium.com/student-teaching-engagement-through-partnerships/micro-sprints-ad44a30486d9

https://medium.com/student-teaching-engagement-through-partnerships/micro-sprints-an-agile-approach-to-curriculum-development-in-partnership-with-students-efdb91f4fde0

https://medium.com/student-teaching-engagement-through-partnerships/using-micro-sprints-to-support-a-student-partnership-teaching-and-learning-project-10398a8afac1