Project lead: Andy Wakefield, Emily Bell, Rose Murray (School of Biological Sciences)

Project summary: Our aim is to provide an accessible, supportive guidance framework which enables the implementation of innovative and creative assessment. Specifically, we would like to develop an interactive guide for teachers and learners which supports the creation of video as a means of assessment. This guide would provide step-by-step instructions on how to use particular audio-visual production/editing software as well as helpful advice on suitable equipment. In addition, we aim to outline an appropriate framework for evaluation of the students’ video projects. This would build significantly on what has been achieved in the study conducted by the University of Bristol’s TELED (technology enhanced learning and education development) team; ‘Case Study: Assessing student video projects’ (Herbert & Visintini, 2010). Their study generated some very useful guidance for assessing student video projects, yet their criteria has somewhat targeted towards modern language assignments. We wish to develop this guidance such that it becomes transdisciplinary. By focussing the assessment of the video at group level and embedding this within a portfolio of supporting tasks we hope that our guidance will be applicable to a greater number of disciplines within higher education.

Ultimately, we hope to instil a wide range of transferrable skills into the students such as collaborative group work, new technical skills and presenting abilities as well as stretching their creative legs. With this in mind, we aim to align the project to the theme of ‘Developing and instilling confidence in students for life after graduation’, by improving their confidence through film production, and raising awareness of their transferrable skills notably through the reflective critique. By completing what we hope to be an example of an authentic assessment (a meaningful, real world task), the students should be further prepared for life after graduation directly by gaining experience in filmmaking (a strong desire of many Biologists) but also through the collaborative project nature of the experience. We hope that the nature of the assessment will provide a sense of accomplishment especially after being able to watch the videos with their peers at the end of the field course.

Project resources: Developing a guide to support the use of video in undergraduate assessment - project summmary 

Project lead: Louise Howson (Bristol Institute for Learning and Teaching)

Project summary: This project will focus on using the narratives of PGRs as a shared resource for other postgraduates to learn from as well as an opportunity to identify any common themes arising from interviews. This project will enable Academic Staff Development along with BILT to explore the landscape of supporting and engaging PGRs with teaching responsibilities across UoB and how the teaching and research roles contribute to building students confidence now and for future roles after their studies. It enables us to go beyond the day to day development of the offer for PGRs by adopting a scholarly research lens on this endeavour to share more widely, across Bristol and the sector.  The intention is this project is the launch pad for positioning Bristol as leading in PGR teaching development alongside their research work by viewing the interface between their teaching roles and their researcher roles.

PGRs are both student and member of staff within the University. As such, they have a unique voice within the institution and may provide valuable insights into their role, their experiences and how we as an institution can fully support their needs. By sharing their experiences with other PGRs, they will be able to provide guidance and support through their narratives and see how reviewing

The experience of reflecting on their practice as a teacher and researcher within the interview will enable the participants to fully engage in reflective practice, a valuable attribute for graduates and key for developing confidence in all facets of their role as a PGR and their future career.

Project resources: Finding my teaching voice - Experiences of postgraduate students with teaching responsibilities - project summary 

Project lead: Louisa Slingsby (Bristol Veterinary School)

Project summary: Mental wellbeing is a crucial factor in our daily lives, personal and professional, while at university and after graduation. Success in any field of employment depends on having not only the relevant knowledge and skills but also an understanding and insight into one’s own mental health as well as developing approaches that promote positive wellbeing. Over the last year, a study has been undertaken by the members of the current group (with support from the School and wider community) and involved a literature review on mental wellbeing to identify practices that promote mental wellbeing in health professionals, as undergraduates and throughout their careers. As a result, an evidence-based set of resources were collated to produce a “Mental Wellbeing Toolbox” for students to develop the personal resources and skills that will promote self-efficacy and a positive, fulfilling and successful career, while also learning to cope if faced with mental ill-health. It also aims to highlight how anyone can benefit from improving their mental wellbeing, resulting in better job (and life) satisfaction. The Toolbox was presented to final year veterinary students (three focus groups, eighteen students). The students were overwhelmingly positive, providing useful feedback and suggestions, and supported a plan to embed wellbeing as a vertical theme in the BVSc curriculum with activities linked to the Toolbox in each year.

This BILT project will build upon the previous study and will aim to:

• Implement and evaluate a wellbeing curriculum using the Mental Wellbeing Toolkit
• Consult across the university to identify opportunities to extend the use of the Toolkit more widely
• Disseminate the findings within and beyond the institution

The project aims to assist students in building their mental wellbeing, personal resources, skills and confidence, and in so doing prepare them for graduation and the workplace.

Project resources: Implementing a Mental Wellbeing Toolbox: Reflections on integration into the veterinary curriculum and identification of opportunities for wider application - project summary

Project lead: Jenny Riker (School of Earth Sciences)

Project summary:  Fieldwork is an integral element of undergraduate degree programmes in a wide variety of fields. It serves as an immersive, active learning experience (Revell and Wainwright 2009) and has been linked to the affective domain and deep learning (Boyle et al. 2007). In earth sciences, geological mapping is a key component of field-based study. Learning to map indoctrinates students into the community of earth science practice and enhances students’ ability to master high order skills, such as the ability to disembed useful information from noise and to translate 2D information into 3D and 4D constructs of the earth (e.g., Reynolds 2012). For these reasons, field mapping remains a cornerstone of academic training in the earth sciences.

Advances in the capabilities of GPS-enabled tablets over the past decade mean that most field data can now be collected, collated, and analysed digitally. Moreover, ease of data transfer and workflow streamlining have rapidly transformed digital field methods into the industry standard. The needs of the geoscience workforce and employer expectations of our graduates are changing as a consequence. In the School of Earth Sciences, field mapping forms a thread through our entire undergraduate curriculum and is currently taught using traditional pen and paper methods.

An approach that relies solely on traditional techniques, however, is increasingly at odds with both professional practice and student expectations. This project will introduce technologies for field-based data collection and analysis into 3rd year a fieldwork unit and evaluate their effectiveness in developing students’ confidence with relation to field skills valued in the geoscience workforce. It aims to better equip our undergraduates with the skills and affectations that will serve them best in life after graduation. It supports the University’s strategic objectives surrounding transformation of digital infrastructure to support student learning and proposes to build online resources for fieldwork training and formative feedback in the mould of Chemistry’s Dynamic Laboratory Manual. If successful, these resources can be extended to other aspects of our field programme and the earth science curriculum.

Project resources: Testing the use of digital technologies for field-based education to enhance graduate confidence and preparedness - project summary

Project lead: Chris Kent and Jess Fielding (School of Psychological Science)

Project summary: A curriculum review highlighted the need for a practical-based approach to teaching small-groups how to conduct research in order to better prepare students for their final year project and a career in research. Formal (including NSS) and informal feedback highlights students’ desire to have an intuitive understanding of statistics and experimental design through small-group teaching and continuous formative feedback. Students approach statistics

with a high degree of anxiety and often disengage early on. By encouraging students to experience research at the very start of their studies, we hope to enable students to be confident, engaged, and willing partners in experimental research. We are undertaking a major revision of the way we teach research methods and statistics. Some of the major objectives of the revision (which align with this project) are:

1. Enable students to programme and conduct their own experiments within TB1
2. Provide rolling formative feedback on knowledge and understanding
3. Enable effective small-group peer support via ‘homework clubs’
4. Embed a culture of participation in lectures via interactive smart-phone response systems (SRS)

These objectives will help us meet our aim of building confident engaged researchers. This project represents a significant departure from current practice in which students receive large-group teaching, with students as passive recipients of knowledge, having little active engagement in their own learning. Currently, there is limited room for interaction, no training in programming, no independent experience of experimental design; no formative feedback beyond assessed lab reports and no formal opportunities to partake in peer-support or small group work. Lecture centred teaching is no longer viable to meet the needs of students.

Thus, we will be moving from teacher-centred delivery to an active partnership including problem based learning (PBL). To achieve this aim, we need to incrementally increase the amount of PBL and the amount of participation in lab sessions and lectures. This project bridges the divide between current practice and where we want to head, using evidence-based practice from this project to inform our redesign.

Project resources: Building Confident Engaged Researchers Through Active Partnership and Problem Based Learning - project summary

Project lead: Alice Robson (School of Biological Sciences) and Pat Triggs (School of Education)

Project summary: The aim of this project is to gain increased understanding of how research experiences develop the identity of students as researchers, by evaluating a new Research Training unit as part of the MSci in Biochemistry and visiting other institutes running similar courses to benchmark our unit.

This project seeks to evaluate the extent to which the unit transforms students into researchers, giving them both the skills and the self-efficacy to complete a successful research project in the final year of the programme. The evaluative study of the new unit will allow us to benchmark the course internally and compare the learning outcomes of the Research Training unit with those from traditional internship-style research projects, by using the students on the BSc programme as a reference group.

Project resources: Evaluation and benchmarking of the new Biochemistry MSci Research Training unit - project summary

Project lead: Chris Adams (Chemistry)

Summary: This work will form part of the unit ‘Communications and Information Skills in Chemistry’, a course on ‘soft’ skills such as group working, giving presentations, scientific thinking and writing, data handling etc. The project will site this teaching within a genuine scientific investigation with an unknown outcome, which is not something that most chemistry students currently experience until their final-year research project; at the moment, the same skills are taught using case studies and example data, whereas the proposed project would use students’ own data. A recognised benefit of undergraduate research is that ‘learning could be truly active and transferrable to other situations.’ (Mary Ann Beninger, in ‘Students as researchers’, Helen Walkington, HEA 2015), and so, though only a fraction of our undergraduates will become research chemists, they can all use the skills gained through this research activity.

The students will conduct an air-quality monitoring survey across the city of Bristol. The resulting data – the concentration of NO2 at various locations across the city - can then be plotted using an application such as Bristol City Council’s ‘Know your place’ to give a city-wide picture, the map of the title. It can be compared with the ‘official’ data from DEFRA air-quality monitoring stations, and with the results of similar ‘citizen-science’ projects from other places, illustrating to our students how to treat large scale scientific data and uncertainty in measurements, and serving as a possible entry point to the work of the Cabot Institute and the ‘Sustainable Futures’ strand of Bristol Futures. They will use the project as a basis for beginning to explore the scientific literature, and present their work both in formal terms, as the first laboratory report of their studies, and in less formal terms as a blog post or magazine article, introducing both of these forms of science communication. The whole class data can be pooled and used to demonstrate the treatment of such datasets, the inherent uncertainties associated with this kind of survey, and the kind of conclusions that can actually be drawn.

It is also proposed to include within the project a science lesson for local primary schools. All the CHEM10002 undergraduates will be taught presentation skills as part of the course, and then volunteers will be offered the opportunity to go into local schools and use them. These volunteers will go into primary schools and lead a session for the children on air pollution, talking to them about greenhouse gases and global warming and talk to them about the air-quality results from their local area; we would aim to do this during British Science Week. These volunteers would be encouraged to become STEM ambassadors, which would provide them with additional training in science communication and further opportunities for outreach activities.

Project resources: MAP: Bristol (Student project to monitor atmospheric pollution) - project summary

Project lead: Aydin Nassehi (School of Electrical, Electronic and Mechanical Engineering)

Project summary: First year mechanical engineering students undertake a 20-credit unit on design and manufacturing throughout TB1 and TB2. As part of this unit they learn about various manufacturing processes, their attributes and applications. The current practice (at time of writing) is that after 4 hours of introductory lectures, the students, divided into groups, research a manufacturing technology and prepare a technical report and a 20-minute presentation on that technology. From Week 5 onwards, two groups present their work to the entire cohort every week and submit the technical report for marking. Student attendance soon becomes a problem as those groups who have already presented their work no longer feel that they have a stake in attending the presentations.

The proposed project would reorganise this activity as a one day research conference. The students would submit a draft version of their report and a review process will be undertaken to provide them with formative feedback. They then submit the revised report which will be reviewed with summative feedback provided. All groups present their findings in a one day conference organised in the reading week of teaching block 2.

This initiative would 1. Give the students a suitable scaffolding for constructing the research papers through providing training in research methods and academic writing; 2. Consolidate the activity into a focused one-day conference that would help attendance; and, 3. Increase the student confidence in publishing and present the results of the work they will undertake in future years through demystifying the process associated with academic conferences 4. Give them transferable skills in presenting their research to different audiences (technical paper for technical referees and presentations for a wider audience.

In addition, with sustainable continuation of the conference, there is an opportunity to link with Bristol futures and potentially invite external participants to listen to the presentations or participate in the selection of awards for best papers to engage the local community. The proceedings will be published and given as a reference book on manufacturing processes to the students at the conference.

Project resources: Student research conference on manufacturing processes - Festival of Learning and Teaching presentation.