Lucia Sagredo

There is a general interest in providing a wide range of forms of assessment in order to improve the performance on metrics such as the National Student Survey (NSS) and the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF). Hence, there has been a growing pressure on staff to innovate on teaching and learning in general. This paper considers the option of continuous assessment and its impact on student's performance, attendance and workload based on a quantitative and qualitative analysis. A study-case based on undergraduate students of Mathematical Sciences will be presented. In a two-semester module, we used the compulsory logbook component to change its assessment method for each semester, and compared continuous assessment throughout the second semester versus single-submission at the end of the first semester. We analysed the correlation between exam results, logbook marks for each semester, class test and written assignments and student attendance, and we examined student views from a survey distributed at the end of the year. The results show that the weekly logbook helped students’ revision and distributed their workload throughout the semester, whilst it made a significant positive difference in performance for students with high attendance.