Helping Psychology Students Write Better Essays

Abstract

The paper reports on an intervention to help psychology students write better essays by using an Essay Feedback Checklist (EFC). A sample of first year and third year psychology students were asked to rate their own essays in terms of how confident they felt they had been in meeting the departmental assessment criteria. Tutors used the same rating scale when marking the essays and used any mismatches between their rating and that of the student to target their feedback. The aims of the study were to look at the effects of using the EFC in i) writing an essay and ii) clarifying written tutor feedback. Findings showed some mismatches between students and their tutors particularly in the third year. Students were mainly positive about the EFC, although some comments indicated that more help was needed. The implications of these findings are discussed in terms of an action research framework and student self-assessment.

Enhancing first year management students' engagement: An action research project to explore the use of the Essay Feedback Checklist (EFC)

“…Norton (1990) argued that there was a mismatch between students' and tutors' rankings whereby students put content fairly high in their rankings and tutors did not rank this criterion at all. The Essay Feedback Checklist (EFC) has been designed to list the assessment criteria used in essay marking and, then, ask students to rate how confident they felt when writing their essay by using a three-point rating scale for each assessment criteria (Completely Confident, Partially Confident and Not Confident At All) (Norton & Norton ,2001;Norton et al, 2002). According to them, the idea of the EFC is that when tutors come to mark students' work, they look at students' own ratings and, then, put their own ratings underneath -whereby there is a big mismatch on where the tutor writes targeted feedback.…”

“…The EFC could be used, also, as a tool that helps students to improve their essay writing (Norton et al, 2002). Designing the EFC involves making a list of the assessment criteria by which first year management students' essays are marked.…”

Using assessment criteria as learning criteria: a case study in psychology

“…Recently, research has also been carried out to explore ways in which criteria can be made more explicit and better understood by students (Norton et al, 2002;O'Donovan et al, 2001;Elander, 2002;Price et al, 2003). New lecturers are inculcated into the arguments by the analogy of shooting at targets in a darkened room, by psychological research on the importance of feedback on performance and so on.…”

Development and evaluation of an intervention to improve further education students' understanding of higher education assessment criteria: three studies

“…Most evaluations of interventions to improve HE student understandings of assessment criteria have compared students from one cohort with those from another (Bloxham & West, 2004;Defeyter & McPartlin, 2007;Norton et al, 2002;Pain & Mowl, 1996), or compared students who decided whether or not to attend workshops (Harrington et al, 2006b;Norton et al, 2005;Rust et al, 2003). The present comparison was between groups of students from the same cohort who were assigned either to receive the intervention or standard tuition, the intervention was incorporated into modules for the groups who received it, and students were tracked longitudinally to assess changes in understanding and beliefs.…”