I offer in-class exercises (which I term workshops), which students hand in at the end of the lecture, which are designed to test their understanding of key farm management calculations/problems/processes and allow me to give individual students formative feedback.
One member of staff. I offer in-class workshops to students studying ACE2020 Introduction to Farm Management and ACE3036 Farm Management. This approach works best with classes of less than 35 students.
The lecture outlines the methodology and general principles and concepts related to the issue under discussion (e.g. recording invoices in cash books, partial budgeting problems, constructing profit and loss accounts from cash flow information). This is followed by a relatively simple classroom example to demonstrate the key principles involved: students are encouraged to contribute answers to the example. These in-class workshops allows students to work through additional examples, which are graduated from relatively simple (to provide encouragement) to more involved.
There are two principal reasons. Some students leave the lecture believing they have understood the taught material but in fact have not really grasped the key concepts. Other students will not have understood what was being taught but, for whatever reason, have not asked for further clarification. In-class exercises allow this first group to be confident they have correctly understood the material. They also allow me to identify those students who have not grasped the issues involved and to provide them with one-to-one tuition.
Students say these workshops are particularly helpful. They give students the confidence that they have understood the lecture. Importantly, the feedback helps me to improve the structure of my lectures. It allows me to increase the emphasis placed on those aspects of the calculations/problems/processes that have proved problematic to students in previous years.
In-class exercises
Student Representation, Research-Informed Teaching
Undergraduate (all Stages)
Agriculture, Food and Rural Development
Online assessment and feedback
Individual students
Info from my subject network/contacts