Show, Tell and Talk – Group projects and dissertations – How to design and deliver successful group projects and dissertations

Overview:

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This is one event in a series of workshops in this year’s BILT Show, Tell and Talk series which aim to explore local research and showcase examples of innovative practice across the University. This session, chaired by Kirsten Cater (Education Director for PGT and Associate Dean, Department of Computer Science), will include a range of examples and ideas exploring how group projects and dissertations can set up and delivered, how such projects are received by students and the advantages and disadvantages of organising and delivering such projects. 

Contributions include/Contributor abstracts:  

Dr Lucy MacCarthy-Morrogh (School of Biochemisty) 

Group research projects are more and more being recognised as a valuable ‘capstone project’ option for students in their final year of study. I’ll talk about one such project that has run for the past two years in the school of Biochemistry. This project gives the students the opportunity to work full time (or as much as their teaching timetable allows) immersed in a research environment – albeit set up in a teaching lab – for the duration of the project. This enables students to adapt to a new environment and become adept and familiar with sophisticated and authentic laboratory techniques and data analysis.  Students rapidly move from being dependents to planning and performing their own experiments and making their own decisions.  Such projects can play a significant part in enabling students to develop many skills, including, importantly, becoming independent and critical thinkers.  

I’ll describe what needed doing to set such a project up, how it has run the last two years, the benefits of such projects to both the students and their school, some limitations, and what I learned from version 1 (run in 2021) that led to tweaks to version 2 (2022). 

Dr Stephanie Pellegrin (School of Biochemistry)  

Year 3 experimental group research project delivered in the Biochemistry Teaching Labs  

The Year 3 Research Project Unit in the School of Biochemistry is an opportunity for students to develop their skills as independent thinkers and researchers. This summative project is the culmination of their university training, often referred to as a ‘capstone’ project, and is worth 20% of the final year mark. Many students choose experimental projects to experience lab work in a research environment. Typically, each student spends ~20 days ‘at the bench’ then writes up their work in the form of a scientific article. My aim was to offer an experimental group research project (GRP) which could be delivered to 6 – 20 students in the Biochemistry teaching labs and which would emulate the experimental projects offered in a research environment. This GRP is allied to a research-active group within the Biochemistry department and enables each student to carry out novel research and design experiments addressing the research hypothesis. I will detail the process of setting up and running an experimental GRP as well as highlight what needs to be taken into consideration along the way. 

Evelyn Miller (Third year Sociology with Quantitative Research Methods BSc and BILT Student Fellow on Decolonising the curriculum) 

 Drawing from my experience of assessment within the SPAIS department at the University of Bristol, my presentation will propose that group projects or assessments are an important part of our education. Group projects offer the opportunity for students to reflect on their own academic practices, to carefully consider how to go about knowledge-sharing to suit other students’ needs and to value the learning and perspectives of their peers. In particular, group projects or assessments can benefit students from marginalised backgrounds, such as neurodiverse students. 

Tracey Maggs (Professional Liaison Officer – Faculty of Social Sciences and Law)  and Tao Wang (Senior Lecturer, School of Management)

 The Professional Liaison Network (PLN) co-ordinates a range of activities that connect students, academics and researchers from the Faculty of Social Sciences and Law with external organisations.   This joint presentation will focus on how the PLN has successfully collaborated with the MSc Management programme academic team to implement applied learning through group projects to give students the opportunity to gain practically orientated experiences that enrich their learning and build employability skills.   We will share our key learnings around the planning, preparation and logistics of setting up group projects and the challenges of scaling up through a series of case studies.    We will also give an overview of the new assessment process and how we have learnt from previous models to ensure the grading structure is both consistent and equitable for all students.  Finally we will discuss student feedback and how this will inform our future practice.