Education in Practice Network

Dr Sophie Sowden-Carvalho is an Assistant Professor in the Centre for Developmental Science, School of Psychology, University of Birmingham. She is an experimental psychologist and co-director of the U21 Autism Research Network. Her research focuses on understanding social communication and wellbeing across the lifespan, with a focus on autistic and non-autistic adults. She also takes a cross-cultural approach with the aim of making her research more diverse and inclusive. As the programme lead for the School of Psychology’s newest MSc in Developmental Science and Neurodiversity, Sophie has an interest in understanding and improving the experiences of neurodivergent university students.

This piece grew out of the design of the MSc’s flagship Neurodiversity module, alongside Sophie’s Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education and application for Advance HE fellowship. It uses the module as a worked example of stakeholder co-production: community members with lived experience of neurodivergence helped design and deliver the formative assessment and feedback. The aim was for a module that trains students to think from a lived experience perspective to build lived experience and inclusive principles into its own assessment and feedback. Although the cohort is small, end-of-module student satisfaction and performance data support the approach’s initial success. For educators, the example shows how a panel of people with lived experience can help shape and deliver formative feedback, building accessibility into assessment from the outset rather than relying only on individual accommodations afterwards.