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I'm Dr. Nick Lund. I work at the Cheshire Faculty and I am one of the Senior Learning
and Teaching Fellows but I also teach in Psychology. What we have been doing for the past 12 years
now is, as our final assessment in Psychology, to have a conference. We hold the conference
at the end of the student's course. So after all the final exams, the week after the final
exam we have a conference. So all the students do a project and at the conference, what they
do it to present their findings, conclusions and so on.
We organise a conference in the same way you would have any other conference. So a national
or international conference, we try to mimic that as much as possible. It tends to be opened
by the Dean. The head of department also has a talk to the students. We have keynote speakers
in, typically alumni who have been successful. So last year we had a clinical Psychologist
come in who was one of our alumni. So it is set up like that and then we have a number
of different strands going on in the same way that you might have at a national or international
conference. The students have to present for 10 minutes
and there are 5 minutes for questions. What we do is to make this quite a substantial
part of their marks for their project work. So it is not just something that is added
on, it is quite a big part. I think it is 25% this year of their marks for the project.
We have two ways of assessing the project really. We have the written report and then
we have the conference, the presentation, and the questions after it. And I think the
questions after it are often very challenging, more often challenging questions from fellow
students than it is from the staff, I must say. It is a challenging experience for them,
but what we have found from some research is that there are a number of different elements
to it. Before the presentations, students are very, very nervous. All of them. Even
the students that are normally very confident are very nervous about the idea of presenting
their work to the rest of their peers and to all the Psychology staff. Post-conference
they think it is one of the best assessments they do. I think there are two reasons for
that. One is that it is the final thing they do in Psychology, a capstone assessment if
you like, for students then it becomes part of their social calendar. It is the last thing
they do; they all meet each other, they all watch each other's work and listen to each
other's findings. And also I think it is the stage at which students feel they are real
psychologists. They are the experts of the day. When they present their work, they have
had a supervisor and the supervisor would guide them but they have become the expert
in their particular narrow field that they are looking at, at that moment. And they recognise
that in themselves and in their fellow students, which suddenly I think they realise it is
not them and us but it is part of a learning community. We try to do that all the way through,
but I think that is when it gels and students realise that they are good at psychology and
each of their peers is good at psychology. At the conference each presentation is assessed
by two members of staff. We try to have three members of staff at least in each of the presentation
rooms/lecture theatres; one of them chairing and two of them assessing so that we've got
a record of the marks and moderation going on at the same time, so that students are
fairly assessed in the presentation they do. It is interesting as well that some student
excel at the conference who don't excel at their written reports. So what we are doing,
I suppose, is giving students a different way of showing their knowledge and understanding
of their project, rather than written reports. For many careers, I suppose presentation of
findings or presentation of work that you have done will be more relevant than written
reports, something that you will end up doing more often. We think that what we do is extend
our students skills of analysis evaluations in that they do it verbally as well as in
the written form. So we have been doing it for 12 years and
I have reported it a couple of times now at conferences. I think the last time was at
the International Congress of Psychology in Stockholm. And what we have found is that
other people are very interested in this and we are hoping that we might be able to get
some sort of international conference going. It has also been taken up by the rest of the
department. It has been seen as a successful model and has worked so well for so long now
that all students who are doing dissertations or projects in the department in other subjects,
such as B.A.(Hons) Abuse Studies and B.A.(Hons) Childhood and Youth, are now adopting this
as a model and it is being rolled out across the department this year. We are hoping now
that we will have a larger conference going on for the whole department rather than just
Psychology students within Interdisciplinary Studies.