Team lead: Jessica Roy (Policy Studies) 

Team members: Beth Stone (Policy Studies), Rachel Lart (Policy Studies) and Jenny Thwaites (Student Wellbeing) 

Project summary: Teaching programmes across the School for Policy Studies engage students with content which may be sensitive and traumatic. How such content is delivered can act to include or exclude students from teaching, learning, and assessment. To enhance student inclusivity and engagement, this project aims to develop School wide guidance for staff on meaningful ways to prepare students for such content. The project will do this by conducting a series of focus groups and questionnaires with students and staff about their views and experiences. The project’s findings, as well as the guidance developed, will have relevance to programmes across the University.  

Team lead: Bronwen Burton (CMM) and Caroline McKinnon (IRC) 

Project summary: This project aims to understand how to make our teaching and assessment more neuro-inclusive. The project team will work with neurodiverse student partners to review assessments, as well as teaching and learning materials. Students will produce a report of their findings for dissemination. This project is timely: recent changes to the criteria for a neurodiverse diagnosis has resulted in an increase in the number of diagnosed students. The project will enable the use of student voice to highlight key areas for development, making teaching and assessments more inclusive for neurodiverse students, as well as the wider student body.  

Project resources: Neuroinclusive teaching, learning and assessment - case study

Team lead: Dave Lawson (Biological Sciences) and Sheila Amici-Dargan (Biological Sciences) 

Team members: Celine Petitjean (Biological Sciences) and Anna McQuillan (Biological Sciences) 

Project summary: In previous years, the School of Biological Sciences has undertaken three student-led projects to audit teaching material and identify opportunities for improvement related to decolonisation (representation, diversity and contextualising BioSciences). However, thus far the experience of students with disabilities has not been addressed in our school. This project will seek to engage two undergraduate student disability partners, supervised by a postgraduate disability partner (Anna McQuillan), modelled on previous decolonisation work, to develop the school’s support of students with disabilities through teaching and assessment audits, self-directed research and liaising between staff and students.  

Team lead: Jane Williams (Health Sciences) 

Team members: Jo Howarth (Bristol Medical School), Sarah Allsop (Bristol Medical School), James Lepoittevin (Health Sciences) 

Project summary: Team Assessment of Behaviour (TAB) is an authentic and valid tool used for trainee doctors to receive feedback on how they are working, contributing, and performing as part of a multi-professional team. We have embedded TAB across all years of the undergraduate medical programme, and whilst most students complete satisfactorily, some students continually struggle.  

Primary and secondary research will explore the following questions: Does an understanding of TAB concept and process influence student engagement and outcomes? How do medical students engage with TAB? What improves engagement and completion? Do particular student groups struggle more?  How can we ensure TAB is truly inclusive?  

Team lead: Alicia Gonzalez Buelga (EEM) 

Team members: Sheila Trahar (Education), Irina Lazar (EEM), Mike Wharton (Mechanical Engineering) 

Project summary: Group assessment is widely used at all levels in the Mechanical Engineering programme. There is strong research supporting its benefits but, although there is a significant literature on group dynamic theories, there are few studies about what occurs in groups during their work and the factors contributing to successful groupwork in engineering. The main objective of this research is to better understand the ingredients for successful group work from a student perspective: learn about their positive and negative experiences and how they evaluate their own and other’s contributions when working in groups. With this better understanding, we aim to co-create, alongside students, guidelines for both academics and students setting and undertaking group work. 

Team lead: Daniela Dietrich (Biological Sciences) 

Team members: Sheila Amici-Dargan (Biological Sciences) 

Project summary: There are two main aims of this project, the first is to understand the benefits and challenges of large cohort group assessments conducted in pairs. A preliminary survey has identified key issues such as coordinating teamwork or choice of partner. We will use focus groups to explore these themes in more depth to evaluate the efficacy of this assessment and guide future improvements. The second aim is to work with student partners to co-create improved assessment guidance to integrate student perspectives into the development and enhancement of assessment practices. 

Team lead: Alice Robson (Biochemistry)

Team members: Bronwen Burton (CMM), Zafar Bashir (PPN) and Ames Mosley (PPN) 

Project summary: The three Biomedical Sciences Schools have been working for 2 years to decolonise and diversify the curriculum. Curriculum reviews and research revealed that students would like more opportunities to explore complex issues around the epistemic legacy of colonialism within their discipline. A BILT-funded pilot version of a workshop on decolonising and diversifying the biomedical sciences was very positively received in 2022/23. The project team now plans to incorporate this workshop into a compulsory unit (cohort ~500 students) aiming to make biomedical science more relevant and accessible to all, allowing international and home students to thrive in their learning. 

Team lead: Claire Spencer (Business School)

Team members: Sotiris Lalaounis (Business School) 

Project summary: Using student reflections on their first semester and interviews at the end of the term to delve deeper into themes, this project aims to reveal the depth of experience felt by a sample of international students with the Business School. Starting in September 2023, the project will implement a research and experience led programme of practical events to help build community, improve language confidence, and develop our students’ academic and personal skills. By asking student participants to reflect on their journey through the semester, the aim is to assess the programme’s success, make improvements, and share findings within and beyond the University. 

Team lead: Polly Barr (Psychological Science) 

Team members: Kristopher Magee (Psychological Science) and Peter Allen (Psychological Science) 

Project summary: Research shows there are differences in home and international students’ engagement in group work. As a British Psychological Society (BPS) accredited degree, a core part of University of Bristol’s Psychology’s curriculum includes group work. This is currently achieved through laboratory classes in Psychological Research Methods (Y1 and Y2/Y3) and the dissertation (Y3/Y4). In groups of 5 or 6, students engage in complex decision making and teamwork and need to be able to communicate and collaborate effectively with each other both in and outside of class. It is imperative that we understand international students’ experience of this key requirement (and significant proportion) of their degree. This project will run focus groups and anonymous surveys with international students to gain their views on working in groups with home students. The focus group questions will ask what they believe is advantageous about being an international student in group work as well as things they feel they need help with. Activities and tasks that could encourage integration and engagement from all group members will be brainstormed and feedback will be collected. Focus groups will be run three times throughout the year to monitor any change as the students’ progress through projects. Thematic analysis will be used to interpret the qualitative data and statistical analysis for the quantitative data. Results of both will be interpreted through meta inferences. The results of this study will be used to inform future teaching practices. 

Team lead: Fiona Hartley (BILT) 

Project summary: International students have to overcome many barriers when they come to study in the UK, not only in terms of culture but also language and academics or ‘pedagogical shock’ (Ryan, 2011). With the number of international students increasing and Bristol aiming to attract more students across all its programmes, the aim of this project will be to provide a toolkit to give students an opportunity to adapt more easily and create a ‘third space’ (McKinley et al, 2019) where learning can take place more effectively.

Team lead: Anastasia Papadopoulou (Economics) 

Team members: Annika Johnson (Economics) and Stefania Simion (Economics) 

Project summary: In 2022/23 a pilot 5-day data visualisation workshop was delivered, teaching students Python through a novel combination of pair programming and specially designed cheat sheets to create a highly social learning environment. Feedback was overwhelmingly positive, and the event was extremely popular with international students (62% of the participants were international). Following its success, this year the project aims to: (i) Scale the event and offer it to a larger number of students (100+) providing them with the opportunity to participate in an authentic activity and develop extremely valuable hard and soft employability skills. (ii) Investigate the effect of teaching innovations (cheat sheets and pair programming) versus traditional means of teaching on student performance and group dynamics when bringing together students from a diverse range of backgrounds and experiences. 

Team lead: Dave Lawson (Biological Sciences) and Celine Petitjean (Biological Sciences) 

Project summary: This project seeks to continue the School’s efforts in decolonising the Biology curriculum, whereby two student partners, will collaborate to improve student experience, in particular international student experience, though the following actions:  

1. Exploring opportunities to incorporate international/non-Global-North role models, researching groups and practices to be highlighted in the Biology undergraduate course to improve representation, diversity, and therefore, the student experience.  
2. Bringing attention and awareness of decolonisation within the School and provide a space for students to discuss and raise concerns.  
3. Participating in the global effort to decolonise curricula at different levels (School, Faculty, University).  

Team lead: Emily Bell (Biological Sciences) 

Project summary: This project is a continuation of a four-year longitudinal study to investigate student experiences following a residential field course at the start of a degree programme and their sense of belonging to both their degree cohort and the wider university. See 2024-25 for further details.