Whole Student Cohort Co-creation of Industry Based Assessments in an Applied Mathematics Module to Promote Student Engagement through Belonging

Abstract

Student engagement has been shown to be impacted by a student’s sense of belonging. As part of a wider initiative to enhance belonging amongst students on Mathematics, Physics and Engineering Foundation Year programmes, the Applied Mathematics team implemented a new assessment strategy using group-work and co-created industry contexts. The team co-created the industrial contexts with the whole student cohort, resulting in five industry themes. These themes were then used to develop five versions of a written test, with each version having questions contextualised to one of the five industry themes, and five versions of a group piece that each tackled a problem from one of these industries. Qualitative feedback from module evaluations suggested a positive impact on students. Additionally, the final exam, which was comparable with the previous year, saw an increase in attendance of 21% and increase in average attainment of 10%, suggesting a positive impact on student engagement within the module. However, this formed part of a wider initiative to promote student engagement through student belonging, and therefore these increases cannot be solely attributed to this assessment strategy.