Author Archives: Sally Jordan

End of a year or end of an era

Those who follow my blog posts, or used to, will have noticed a distinct lack of activity. This is partly because I am a bit busy in my Head of School role at the Open University. I have much reduced … Continue reading

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“A shepherd has 125 sheep and 5 dogs. How old is the shepherd?”

To my mind this question is clearly unanswerable. I was therefore shocked to read, in an old but interesting book (Redish, 2003) that many schoolchildren try to find an answer. (“The teacher, wouldn’t give me a problem that has no … Continue reading

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Establishing a free-text version of the force concept inventory

The Force Concept Inventory, established by Hestenes et al. (1992) is the original and best well known concept inventory. The idea is that you use the FCI pre- and post-instruction, asking students a bunch of questions which give you a … Continue reading

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Reflections on the International Conference on Women in Physics

I’ll admit it, the link between this post and the blog’s declared subject matter is a bit tenuous. Some of my research is into demographic differences in attainment in physics, in particular apparent gender differences in attainment, which may or … Continue reading

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A call for a holistic student assessment experience

Oh dear! It has been too long since I posted to this blog and now I only have about 30 mins in which to try to catch up. I’ve very quickly updated my biography etc and tried to remove some … Continue reading

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EAMS 2016

Back in September I was delighted to be a keynote speaker at EAMS: the first ever conference on E-Assessment in the Mathematical Sciences. For more information about the conference in general click here; for a recording of my keynote click … Continue reading

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Failure or success?

I can be a bit of a glass half empty sort of person, but recent events have made me reflect on society’s capacity to look for failure in success. I guess my thinking comes in part from the events surrounding … Continue reading

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Keys to transforming assessment at institutional level: selected debates from AHE2016

Hot on the heals of my post about Sue Bloxham’s keynote at the Assessment in Higher Education workshop in June, this post is about the follow-up  Transforming Assessment webinar “Keys to transforming assessment at institutional level: selected debates from AHE2016. … Continue reading

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Central Challenges in Transforming Assessment at the Departmental and Institutional Level

Back on 30th June, Assessment in Higher Education (AHE) held a seminar  in Manchester with the theme of “Transforming assessment and feedback in Higher Education on a wider scale: the challenge of change at institutional level”. The idea behind the seminar … Continue reading

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Fishy feedback

I don’t think that I am ever going to win prizes for my artwork. However this post is about my picture of a fish, shown below: A month or so ago, I was invited to take part in a live … Continue reading

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