Improving undergraduate student assessment literacy in a developmental neurobiology essay

This poster was presented at the Australasian Neuroscience Society (ANS) Conference 2022. The poster describes data collected to evaluate the impact of introducing a learning activity, designed to help students develop assessment literacy, on production of a scientific essay. Our data show that students who completed this activity performed significantly better on the assessment task compared to students who did not complete the activity (mean 14.6/20 versus 16.1/20 or 73% versus 80%, p<0.001). The activity required students to assess two example essays and then compare their assessment to that of a panel of 'expert' markers. Our data also demonstrated that students tended to underestimate higher quality work but overestimated the quality of poorer work. We suggest that completion of this activity may help students become more literate to the requirements of the assessment task, which may help develop evaluative judgement and that further learning activities could be developed to address student misconceptions about the quality of work and to help students further develop evaluative judgement.