‘If you mark student work in higher education or are involved in academic leadership of teaching and assessment in sport and exercise science then this webinar is for you.
Have you ever experienced big discrepancies in assessment decisions for the same piece of student work? This webinar will use contemporary research literature and practice to explore why this happens and how this can be mitigated.
During the webinar you will be asked to make judgements on sport and exercise science student performances (poster presentations). You will then be guided through a process of social moderation of these academic standards. This will provide you with a framework for how you can start to calibrate academic standards in your specific context.’
There is significant focus upon protecting the value of UK degrees in the Higher Education sector currently (Universities UK, 2020; QAA, 2022) and those in sport and exercise science are no different. Research has shown repeatedly, that under blind conditions judgements of the same piece of work by different assessors varies considerably (See Bloxham, 2009). The social constructed and tacit nature of academic standards is at the heart of this variation. Social moderation and calibration is an approach that brings academics together to jointly discuss the academic standards they hold by applying them to concrete exemplars of student work. This process, carried out separately from marking, has considerable potential for reducing the variability in academic standards.
This webinar will explore these ideas in more detail and model an approach to calibration of academic standards. You review and make judgements on student performances during the webinar and then participate in a dialogic process of peer review with other participants in order to reach a shared understanding of the academic standard. This will foreground some of the limitations of existing tools claiming to support consistent standards and also the challenges to be considered when undertaking calibration activities. The webinar will provide a model for how you can work with programme, subject or departmental teams to support the development of greater shared standards in sport and exercise science.
