The National Student Survey (NSS) in the UK has since 2005 questioned final year undergraduate students on a broad range of issues relating to their university experience. Across disciplines and universities students have expressed least satisfaction in the areas of assessment and feedback. In response to these results many educational practitioners have reviewed and revised their procedures and the UK Higher Education Academy (HEA) has produced guidelines of best practice to assist academics in improving these specific areas. The Product Design and Development (PDD) degree at Queen’s University Belfast is structured with an integrated curriculum with group Design Build Test (DBT) projects as the core of each year of the undergraduate programme. Based on the CDIO syllabus and standards the overall learning outcomes for the programme are defined and developed in a staged manner, guided by Bloom’s taxonomy of learning domains.
Feedback in group DBT projects, especially in relation to the development of personal and professional skills, represents a different challenge to that of individual assignment feedback. A review of best practice was carried out to establish techniques which could be applied to the particular context of the PDD degree without modification and also to identify areas where a different approach would need to be applied.
A revised procedure was then developed which utilised the structure of the PDD degree to provide a mechanism for enhanced feedback in group project work, while at the same time increasing student development of self and peer evaluation skills. Key to this improvement was the separation of peer ratings from assessment in the perception of the students and the introduction of more frequent face to face feedback interviews.
This paper details the new procedures developed and additional issues which have been raised and addressed, with reference to the published literature, during 3 years of operation.