Enhancing Teaching
&
Learning Practice
The next stage of the project was to drive student awareness of and engagement with the development of their professional skills. The aim was to determine how confident our students feel in their ability to identify these professional skills, reflect upon their development of these skills, and usefulness of tracking these reflections through the use of an ePortfolio.
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Pilot Reflections
Through the use of a survey, 3rd-year students were asked to rate themselves in each of the identified skills. The rating options they were provided with were Completely Confident, Fairly Confident, Somewhat Confident or Not Confident at all. The students were provided with the skills definitions when completing the survey, and they were also asked to reflect on why they selected that particular rating for each skill. The figure below indicates the result of this survey, with each segment representing two students.
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The students then saved their responses in their ePortfolio in the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), Brightspace, so that they could return to them for reflection at a later date.
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Overall, students showed higher confidence with more technical skills as well as communication and management, however, showed little confidence with more global themes such as societal and sustainability. They demonstrated some understanding of these skills, however, weren’t clear on how to incorporate these themes into their work. As a team, we have reflected on how we can improve this aspect and intend to be more explicit when covering these themes in our modules.
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A thematic analysis of the pilot reflections gave us an insight into how confident students felt in each of the skills. However, we also found three key aspects which caused us to reflect on how we might approach this exercise differently next year.
The first was that students found it difficult to ascertain how accomplished they were in each skill and so we will create a scale for students to assist them the next time. The scale can use terms such as “Awareness”, “Experience” or “Ability” to help students gauge their current status.
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Furthermore, There was a strong lack of proactivity evident in the students’ feedback. Students didn’t appear to feel confident in an area unless they had been taught it and there was little recognition of experience or knowledge gained from outside the classroom, through committees, clubs and societies, work placements, hobbies etc. This made us consider the importance of being explicit when exposing students to the various skills identified. We have taken this on board in our discussions with lecturers about updates to modules in the coming academic year.
Student Feedback
With the exception of dissemination of the findings, the last part of the project was to see how the students found the process and feedback into the programme how students would like the engagement with and reflection on their development of their professional skills. A focus group was held with students at the end of the semester to get their input.
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From this process, some of the approaches to be considered by the programme team going forward include:
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Include reflection on professional skills from First Year, as a multi-module activity
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Incorporate a scale for each skill so students can score themselves and see their progression from year to year
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Utilise digital badges that could be incorporated into their professional public-facing portfolio (LinkedIn or other)
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