If you missed the first blog in this series, you can catch up here.
The first time we met the students was early February 2025. They had returned from the Christmas break, completed their first set of assessments and were settling into their second teaching block.
We spent the day reflecting on how they had got to be where they were. Some had come from other countries, some were local to Bristol. Some had come through foundation courses, some were fresh out of college and sixth form. A few had been in employment or working part time for many, many years. All had completely different backgrounds and reasons for being in that room.
So, we – and they – were struck by how many similarities they had when it came to our main research themes, which are:
- Transition
- Assessments
- Academia
- Community
- Communication
Although there is major overlap between a lot of these themes, I’m going to focus on two in this blog: academia and assessments (as this is a learning and teaching blog…).
Assessments
I don’t think anyone will be surprised to read that students were quite emotional when we came to speak about their assessments. In fact, it was one of the areas that students had found most difficult to navigate. The same sentence was said again and again:
“I don’t know what good looks like.”
For students who had academically excelled for most of their lives felt quite lost. They did not know how much work they needed to do when revising – with many saying they had made themselves very stressed and had ‘over-prepared’ (having now seen their results).
Suggested change: A key suggestion put forward was to offer students access to past papers, or to practice questions that were very similar to what they would encounter in an exam. Although, staff may feel this is not supporting students to be independent learners, there is something around being more transparent about the requirements of university assessments, especially int he first year when there are so many unknowns for students. This can be done by unpacking marking criteria and working with examplars to better scaffold the process.
Students showed a preference for coursework across the board (bar one student!) and said that they also enjoyed doing a range of different assessment types (e.g. podcasts, videos) but that they needed a lot of support when first trying them out.
Of course, A.I. and assessment also came up in our discussions with students, who largely held the same opinion as the majority of students we encounter: they accept that it is there and should be somewhat embedded within learning and assessment, but feel nervous about it because the guidelines as to what is acceptable can be quite blurry.
Academia
As students were from a broad range of backgrounds, we did not discuss in detail the units they had been taking but instead focussed on how their academic work could be supported.
Students who had taken a Foundation course before starting their undergraduate degree highlighted how valuable it had been in helping them acquire essential study skills needed. There was a clear call among students for more study skills support across the board, especially when it came to AI skills and levelling the playing field.
Some students had been surprised about the volume of reading they were required to do as part of preparation for their course. There were also concerns around group work and flipped learning – with some students finding it valuable and others not appreciating it.
The PASS scheme was universally popular – but is not available for all students. Students felt strongly that this opportunity should be available to all students who wish to engage with it.
Suggested change: Students felt it would be valuable if ways of working and the expectations of the working on the unit were more clearly explained, such as how much time they needed to spend on pre-lecture work and follow up work. Time management in the first year is often cited as a challenge as students have to be more independent, but giving them a guide for this can be very valuable.
Throughout the day we discussed SO much more than this – wellbeing was a central theme for all our discussions and how good or bad mental (and physical!) wellbeing played into every other aspect of University life. It was so interesting meeting the students a few months after these initial conversations and hear about how much more confident they felt in some areas, and the concerns they had about their next transition – into their second year…
We’ll be sharing the outcomes of those discussions, as well as what they included in their journal entries, in the next instalment of this series.
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