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Don’t you just love it at the start of a movie, when that quirky little Pixar lamp is twisting about and the smell of popcorn is wafting up, and you hear the line “From the team that brought you Shrek, here comes Shrek 2”. It evokes memories of characters you…
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'Faking good' is the practice of showing yourself in a better light without much substance to back it. In academic terms, faking good is looking smart, intelligent and talented with apparently effortless ease. It is the comfy chino to the hardwearing tight jeans; the flip flop to the heavy mountain boot; the micro-wave…
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Tommy is my eleven year old son who has just moved from a highly rated Church of England primary school in Winchester to the wilds of the Elementary in the American Embassy School in Delhi, where the 'uniform' is shorts, t-shirts, a cap and sneakers. At this early stage in the transition, he…
Many years ago I read a cautionary article in a qualitative research journal by Steinar Kvale called "The 1,000 page question". In the article he was ruminating on what a person does with massive volumes of interview data. Picture the lonely PhD student chain smoking in a draughty garret above the railway junction with only…
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The volume of TESTA data is both thrilling and overwhelming (1500 AEQs, 46 focus groups with 265 students, 20 programme audits), but it’s not the size that counts but the meaning and influence it has over the student experience. More of that later. The most revolutionary part of TESTA is not…
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I was training a new researcher from Bath Spa to undertake the TESTA research process with programmes who have requested this at her university last week. She asked the obvious question “How long does it take…?” We have been asked this before and we usually muddle through a reply “as…
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You gets what you pays for... The Higher Education Academy has launched a seminar series with a strand on “getting more for less” in its upcoming Assessment and Feedback series. “Getting more for less” is quite a catchy title in a Higher Education system beginning to experience some serious slashing…
Graham Gibbs' throw-away line "If feedback is not back in ten days, it's not worth doing" is controversial and irritating to academics - if - and here's the big if - they carry on doing assessment and feedback in the same way. If it's a case of turning round 120,…
