5. Assess, provide feedback and report on student learning
HOW CAN I ENSURE THAT MY STUDENTS USE THE FEEDBACK THAT I GIVE THEM?
It is commonly reported that students do not read teacher feedback comments (Duncan, 2007). The literature suggests that a part of the problem is that teachers (and students) see feedback in isolation from other aspects of the teaching and learning process, and consider feedback to be primarily a teacher owned endeavour (Taras, 2003). Correspondingly, the literature suggests that the feedback process is most effective when all the protagonists are actively involved in the process. Helpful strategies While some students may be primarily grade-focused, there are a number of strategies that can be used to maximise student engagement with the process.
• Design assessment so that students can see the direct benefits of attending to feedback advice. This can be done by breaking assignments into stages and providing feedback which is essential to the successful navigation of subsequent stages. In addition, students can be required to document how they used feedback to advance to the next stage of the exercise. This strategy has the additional benefits of encouraging students’ meta-cognition and making them more active participants in the feedback-learning cycle. The workload for teachers can be offset by the reduction of time needed to give feedback on the final product and by incorporating peer feedback into some of the stages (Nicol, 2008).
• Encourage student reflection on feedback comments and give a provisional grade, but invite students to talk about their work and potentially earn a higher grade. Some commentators suggest withholding the grade altogether until students have read the comments and indicated this in some way (Taras, 2003).
• It is possible that students do not pay attention to comments because they do not make sense to them (Duncan, 2007) or that they do not understand the purpose of the feedback process. This is accentuated when feedback is delivered solely by the teacher and is often associated with students as the marking of what is right and wrong. Many teachers may also tend to focus on the correctional rather than the instructional aspects of feedback (Hattie & Timperley, 2007).
• Prime the students about the nature of feedback and its role in the learning process.
• Actively involve students in learning what the criteria mean and in understanding the goals and purposes of feedback.
• Get students to “mark” and provide feedback on examples of previous work in relation to the stated criteria and then have a class discussion on this (Nicol, 2008). This application exercise assists students to interpret criteria more precisely than is usually the case and helps to bridge the gap between the way the lecturer understands the criteria and the students’ interpretation of them.
• Explicitly link feedback to the assessment criteria.
• Make self and peer assessment a required component of the assessment regime.
• Extend overall conversation around assessment and feedback and make the students more active participants in the whole process. Feedback is then likely to be most useful to students’ learning.
• Use the phrase “feed-forward” as this encourages both teachers and students to focus on future learning.
• Invite students to co-construct the criteria.
Sourced: Duncan, N. (2007). ‘Feed-forward’: improving students’ use of tutor comments, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education. 32 (3), 271-283.
Nicol, D. & Draper, S. (2008). Redesigning written feedback to students when class sizes are large. Paper presented at the Improving University Teachers Conference, July, Glasgow
Taras, M. (2003). To feedback or not to feedback in student self-assessment. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 28 (5), 549-565.
Hattie, J. and Timperley. H. (2007). The Power of feedback. Review of Educational Research, 77, 81-112
HOW CAN I ENSURE THAT MY STUDENTS USE THE FEEDBACK THAT I GIVE THEM?
It is commonly reported that students do not read teacher feedback comments (Duncan, 2007). The literature suggests that a part of the problem is that teachers (and students) see feedback in isolation from other aspects of the teaching and learning process, and consider feedback to be primarily a teacher owned endeavour (Taras, 2003). Correspondingly, the literature suggests that the feedback process is most effective when all the protagonists are actively involved in the process. Helpful strategies While some students may be primarily grade-focused, there are a number of strategies that can be used to maximise student engagement with the process.
• Design assessment so that students can see the direct benefits of attending to feedback advice. This can be done by breaking assignments into stages and providing feedback which is essential to the successful navigation of subsequent stages. In addition, students can be required to document how they used feedback to advance to the next stage of the exercise. This strategy has the additional benefits of encouraging students’ meta-cognition and making them more active participants in the feedback-learning cycle. The workload for teachers can be offset by the reduction of time needed to give feedback on the final product and by incorporating peer feedback into some of the stages (Nicol, 2008).
• Encourage student reflection on feedback comments and give a provisional grade, but invite students to talk about their work and potentially earn a higher grade. Some commentators suggest withholding the grade altogether until students have read the comments and indicated this in some way (Taras, 2003).
• It is possible that students do not pay attention to comments because they do not make sense to them (Duncan, 2007) or that they do not understand the purpose of the feedback process. This is accentuated when feedback is delivered solely by the teacher and is often associated with students as the marking of what is right and wrong. Many teachers may also tend to focus on the correctional rather than the instructional aspects of feedback (Hattie & Timperley, 2007).
• Prime the students about the nature of feedback and its role in the learning process.
• Actively involve students in learning what the criteria mean and in understanding the goals and purposes of feedback.
• Get students to “mark” and provide feedback on examples of previous work in relation to the stated criteria and then have a class discussion on this (Nicol, 2008). This application exercise assists students to interpret criteria more precisely than is usually the case and helps to bridge the gap between the way the lecturer understands the criteria and the students’ interpretation of them.
• Explicitly link feedback to the assessment criteria.
• Make self and peer assessment a required component of the assessment regime.
• Extend overall conversation around assessment and feedback and make the students more active participants in the whole process. Feedback is then likely to be most useful to students’ learning.
• Use the phrase “feed-forward” as this encourages both teachers and students to focus on future learning.
• Invite students to co-construct the criteria.
Sourced: Duncan, N. (2007). ‘Feed-forward’: improving students’ use of tutor comments, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education. 32 (3), 271-283.
Nicol, D. & Draper, S. (2008). Redesigning written feedback to students when class sizes are large. Paper presented at the Improving University Teachers Conference, July, Glasgow
Taras, M. (2003). To feedback or not to feedback in student self-assessment. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 28 (5), 549-565.
Hattie, J. and Timperley. H. (2007). The Power of feedback. Review of Educational Research, 77, 81-112