Seeds for Solutions, How does the past inform the future? Innovation projects from 2000/01 #KATS2015

Project Title: Web Support for Student Peer Review. 

Project Leader(s): Stephen Bostock 

Student peer review of coursework can be a valuable learning experience for both reviewers and authors, and offers additional feedback to students on their work without the staff time involved in additional marking. However, for courses of any size the administration of reviewing with multiple reviewers is a significant load. The need for single anonymity (authors do not know reviewers) or double anonymity (and reviewers do not know authors) adds to the complexity, requiring anonymous codes to be used if reviews are forwarded directly to authors. Other considerations include the allocation of equal reviewing loads to reviewers, and avoiding pairs of students who review each other's work.


As long as students access to have email and the web, most of this administration can be automated. This project will deliver a web site for general use allowing tutors to specify a list of authors and reviewers, the coursework to be reviewed (possibly with its URL), the number of reviews per coursework, the criteria to be used, and the type of feedback required (qualitative/quantitative). Tracking of the reviewing process and archiving of reviews will allow tutors to monitor the process and see its results conveniently

Web Support for Student Peer Review-Presentation slides

Web Support for Student Peer Review-Project Report 

Web Support for Student Peer Review. by Stephen Bostock, Keele University is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Project Title: Development of a Writing Skills Programme for First Year UG Students. 

Project Leader(s): Susan Bruce and Monica McLean 

Employers, like academics, frequently lament the decline in literacy standards of undergraduates; academics, however, have neither time nor resources to ensure that students graduate with literacy skills whose value is substantial, but whose acquisition necessitates systematic tuition. Current practice largely depends on individual academics addressing individual errors of individual students; more effective and efficient a model of delivering tuition concerning literacy skills is the North American Freshman Seminar wherein key literacy skills, embedded within discipline-specific courses, are communicated to students in their first semester. We will construct an outline for an Introductory Writing Course which could be adopted internally by different disciplines within Keele University to improve the writing skills of Keele undergraduates. We will research modes of delivery of such courses currently in operation in the UK and the USA; evaluate and select support materials such as handbooks; construct a course syllabus which would be transferable to other disciplines; organise a workshop for those who will be teaching on the course. We plan to pilot this course in the Autumn semester of the academic year 2001-2002, in the introductory module of the new Single Honours degree in English and American Literature, and to evaluate its success at the end of its initial semester.

Development of a Writing Skills Programme for First Year UG Students - Final Report

Project Title: Development of a Writing Skills Programme for First Year UG Students. by Susan Bruce and Monica McLean, Keele University is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.