Engagement and feedback tools for students

School:   GeoSciences

Team Members: Andrew Cross, Hannah Cornish, Steve Earl, Jule Hildmann, Margaret Petrie, Marion Smith, Ali Grant

Abstract

Students from many backgrounds benefit from courses that include elements of community-based service learning and internships. Although the benefits to students are well documented, previous work has highlighted barriers (e.g. a lack of structured feedback) to fully realise the potential of their projects. Alongside this the community perspectives are not fully recognised, and measuring the success and legacy of projects is difficult.

The project will address these two issues by enabling students to better evaluate - and thereby steer - the impact of their projects by offering them tools to engage with their community partners, to ask for and give feedback, and to evaluate the impact of their delivered services to the community. We will synthesise the perspectives of students and community partners on how successful and sustainable their working relationships and outcomes already are, and how they could be improved to both enhance the student experience and community gain.

This will be done by developing and testing methods for gathering and enhancing feedback from project partners, and co-producing a framework (with students and partners) for evaluating the impact of projects. This will be done by examining different approaches / typologies of course alongside different types of external partners (e.g. charity, school, NGO) – and developing a suite of feedback techniques and quantitative and qualitative evaluative tools that can be implemented by the students during their projects.

Final Project Report

Download the final project report (PDF)