A presentation from the STEM Annual Conference 2014.
The increasing diversity in the student population means that approaches to learning and teaching need to be designed to accommodate and reflect a range of educational linguistic and cultural backgrounds. One area where this comes into particularly sharp focus is assessment. There is some evidence that international students may perform less well than home students in essay-based examinations perhaps in part due to slower language processing speeds and a lack of experience of the UK assessment system. However there is little research to date on the comparative performance of home and international students in STEM disciplines. While assessments in these subject areas are perhaps less critically dependent on language skills many other factors may affect students’ performance particularly in their first year at university. This is a critical transition period for all students but non-UK students are faced with a number of additional pressures for example different educational and assessment experiences and a different subject knowledge base.
We will present findings from a two-year study of first year undergraduate students’ expectations experiences and attainment across a range of assessment tasks in scientific disciplines at the University of Edinburgh highlighting differences in attainment in both end-of-course examinations and the variety of assessment tasks that comprise the continually assessed components in many early years science courses.
