Continuing to drive student engagement in a changing HE landscape
Pearson worked with Dr Catherine Dobson at the University of Hull to look at how first year engineering students used Mastering both pre- and post-Covid.
In the study, Dr Dobson expands on how she delivered assessment in particular – for example:
- Assigning for credit
- Integrated into the VLE, clearly and consistently
- Online resource is linked to lecture content and is timetabled effectively
- Lecturers monitor student progress, intervening to support where necessary.
Student feedback about Mastering Engineering
“Having the credit each week is really important – if that was scrapped, a lot less people would do the work. Having a grade each week gets people going back to it.”
“It helped my skills understanding. I could go back to look at earlier things to help me with the harder questions. [...] The hints were really useful. You could break down the bigger questions into smaller stages...if you got it wrong, you could see exactly where you went wrong instead of going right back to the start.”
- Student, University of Hull
In 'A different year: 2019/20' (p23 onwards) there is an in-depth analysis of the impact Covid had on trends.
- It seemed reasonable to conclude that increasing the course credit from 1% to 3% per assignment did motivate students.
- This incentive likely contributed to the levels of average participation which are at their highest for 5 years at 83.76%.