Catching up

Another day of catching up, including:

• Talking to a charity sector partner organisation about recruiting a student intern to work with them in the coming academic year.  
• Making arrangements for students to resit exams deferred from May/June, including special needs such as extra time and particular colour of paper (yellow can help with some disabilities).
• Marking some literature review papers submitted by students on the Health Psychology Masters programme (Reducing weight bias in healthcare professionals, home carers' experience of dementia care, types of chronic fatigue).  
• Giving feedback on the data analysis a PhD student has done.
• Attempting to write references for recent graduates (with some difficulty as the online student records system seems to have temporarily gone phut)

Hoping to get back into my own research tomorrow!

Sampling

Spent most of today on administrative tidying: getting samples of work ready to be seen by the external examiners for the various programmes I am 'module leader' on:

• BSc Hons Health & Lifestyle Management: Second year and third year psych modules
• BSc Hons Psychology: a third year module on applied health psychology 
• MSc Health Psychology: a module on long term conditions 

External examiners are senior academics from outside institutions who look at a sample of our students' work - in the context of a lot of other information - and check our academic standards.

For every module this requires the designated leader to put together a pack of information which typically includes:

• Copy of the module guide and all guidance given to student on the assessment they're required to do
• Copy of an overall marks list showing individual students' marks for each component (piece of coursework, exam, etc.), plus summary statistics for the whole group.
• Copies of marked coursework with evidence that marks have been internally moderated (checked) by another academic
• Copies of exam papers - with markers' guidelines
• Copies of marked exam scripts with evidence that marks have been internally moderated (checked) by another academic

Some external examiners also request summary statistics broken down per exam question (to see if some questions seemed 'harder' than others).

We also have to produce a form that shows an assessment 'audit trail' - evidence that we got all our assessment tasks and instructions checked and signed off by another academic within the department - before we used them. This process does happen but keeping a record can sometimes be forgotten...

All of the documentation required is kept on file until near the examination boards  - which are in the next couple of weeks - but it's still rather time consuming to collate it together into a digestible form. Not the most interesting of tasks but it still gives a sense of closure on the filing front.

Meanwhile of course teaching and assessment continues apace on postgraduate courses and preparations have to be made for students who'll be doing resits over the summer period.

Mostly marking -and a new department

A lot of marking in last 24 hours... 


Students on a final year module in health psychology took a multiple choice class test under exam conditions some weeks ago. This was administered online and gave them their marks and feedback right away - thus meeting our demanding new targets for providing timely student feedback - a key element in getting good student satisfaction scores and rising up the university league tables.


Unfortunately the marking key that had been provided had some errors in it. A couple of students noticed that they'd been marked as wrong for answers they were sure they'd gotten right. I have spent many hours in the interim checking all 100 questions and regrading all students' papers manually.  Rather than being a quick and easy way to objectively assess students this turned out to be very time consuming and difficult - urgh.  What didn't help was that every students' virtual test 'paper' had the questions numbered differently and presented in a randomised order. This technical wheeze is meant to make it less likely that students sitting at adjacent PCs might be tempted to copy each others' answers. It also made it a pain to identify the problem items when regrading them by hand.


Much simpler was my exam essay marking for M99PY Management of Chronic Illness and Disability. Only nine candidates, with two essays each. Very low tech (and arguably less objective), but much more pleasant to do.  All the scripts are anonymised and I now hand them over to a colleague who will sample some and second mark them to check that the grading standard is appropriate and consistent.


The tedium was relieved today by a brief launch lunch, to celebrate the creation of a new academic department. Our faculty has just been restructured. Psychology will now be joined by colleagues from Clinical Psych, Criminology and Forensic and Investigative Studies, to form a new department called Psychology and Behavioural Sciences. 




 

Finally finished all that marking

urgh... Finally managed to finish the dissertation marking today, and sent off my draft modules for the new degree programme:

Level 3: Clinical and Counselling Psychology

The aim of this module is to provide students with a comprehensive understanding of the fields of clinical and counselling psychology, and the settings and client groups with whom clinical and counselling psychologists work. 

Level 2: Professional Skills for Psychology Graduates

The aim of this module is to provide students with opportunities to develop, reflect on and refine the core subject-specific and generic transferable skills they will need to pursue graduate opportunities relevant to psychology. 

Keen colleagues are off to a writing retreat tomorrow but I have to confess that I will be on the allotment ...

The hills are alive...

...with the sound of marking.

OK it's the end of term and it would be tempting to run for the hills (or at the very least the allotment) in search of recreation, but I have just received twelve dissertations to mark, which come to 11.3 MB of text.   No Easter holidays for me just yet...

Can't believe it's the last week of term already

Can't believe it's the last week of term already.  Still lots to try to get finished. Some recent highlights:

Been marking student assignments on the module I run on our MSc Health Psychology programme. Students have to write a case study of a hypothetical person who has a chronic health condition, describe the psychosocial issues they face, then choose and justify a self management intervention that will help them with these issues. Students can choose any condition they wish. Diabetes, HIV and arthritis proved the most popular choices this year.

I've also been writing new modules for the degree restructuring that's currently taking place for next academic year, including: clinical and counselling psychology, applied social psychology and professional skills for psychology graduates. I'm particularly keen on the last of these but finding an assessment strategy that will work for such a large group of students (its a mandatory module) will be a bit of a challenge.

In the last week I've drafted ethics submissions for projects with external collaborators, on the experience of volunteering and of monitoring one's fertility. I'm hoping that dissertation students and/or placement students will work on these in the next six months to a year.

I've also just submitted a research paper on PCOS to a journal - please please PLEASE don't let it be rejected... and have decided to write a blog entry as an excuse to digress from the very long NHS form I have been struggling with...

Has it really been so long?

Been busy  - too busy... But back to it:

Supervising a test today for students on the third year option module Applied Health Psychology.  Students took the test online and got their results immediately - nicely meeting the new fast turnaround time for student feedback ;-) - with exception of a few who encountered technical problems and will get their papers manually marked within a day or so.

Some very pleasing results overall.

In the interim, one of my colleagues (Erica Bowen) has been on Radio 4 Women's Hour, discussing her new book on domestic violence. Listen again is highly recommended http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00yj189

Hourly paid teaching posts

Can't believe I was still doing marking moderation today  - at the end of the first week of sabbatical.  I suppose it is inevitable that some teaching duties hang over into the beginning of the new term.

Also had a brief chat with the colleague who is covering my level tutor duties, about arrangements for returning students on Monday coming.

Our department has been able to offer some hourly paid teaching posts this year, to offer experience to aspiring new lecturers, and to free up colleagues to undertake applied research. There's an advert live at the moment, so if anyone's interested, please see the university website.

Misty eyed

I have been working today  - HONEST.  More marking  - had enough now.  Just a few emails, etc. to deal with before it's time to put up the 'out of office' sign and then I'm officially on my hols.

Off to the misty autumnal Norfolk broads for a few days messing around in a boat. 

Different grades...

Today I have mostly been:
Doing an awful lot of marking.

Our MSc Health Psychology students each submit a paper prepared for publication in a specified journal, based on the empirical study they did for their dissertation.  Some interesting topics and high quality work - but marking them takes ages.  Grading each one is effectively the same as completing a peer review for a journal.  Each is marked by the original supervisor and independently marked by another memeber of the course team. 

The process hasn't been helped by having to be blind second marker on a resit undergraduate project which was three times the specified length!  Needless to say this did not endear it to me. 

Picture credit: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Different_grades_of_maple_syrup.jpg