Assessment and Feedback Resources Hub

College of MVLS - Undergraduate & Postgraduate

Class size: Small, medium or large
Technological competancy: Basic
Suitable for online learning

Summary

​​Assessment feedback is an issue raised consistently by students as influencing their course satisfaction, with students requesting more detailed and clearer feedback. However, with increasing staff numbers, tight marking deadlines, and greater pressures on staff time, it is necessary to consider new ways to communicate feedback to more effectively support students’ learning while at the same time increasing efficiency of delivery. Hulme and Forshaw (2009) identify the importance of students’ ability to make effective use of feedback. To this end, a proforma was developed that encourages students to: reflect on previous assessment feedback; consider its generalisability in feeding-forward to future assessments; identify areas of good practice to maintain, goals for improvement for subsequent assessments, and how they might be able to work towards achieving these goals. Students are critically engaged in the feedback process and encouraged to develop reflective learning and self-assessment skills. The aim is to change students’ perceptions of the usefulness of feedback on assessment. The intervention was much appreciated by students after engagement, and also by staff.​ 

Objectives

​​Despite intentions by staff, assessment feedback often seems like a breakdown in communication, whereby staff spend considerable time composing feedback for students; students frequently ask for more and more detailed feedback as they are mystified about what the comments mean and how to use these to improve; and staff are mystified that the students are still mystified! This issue is compounded by increases in student numbers and pressures on staff time. For instance, research has highlighted that discussing feedback with students can be effective (Orsmon, Merry and Reiling, 2006); however, in the current climate of the “massification” of higher education this is not always practical (Hulme and Forshaw, 2009). 

Higgins et al. (2002) found that students often lack time to reflect on their feedback, and may only attend to feedback which they believe gives them the answers, and as a result it does not encourage them to develop their learning. Thus students often seem unable to benefit from feedback and engage with it in a way that will allow them to use this to feed-forward to other assessments, and they subsequently report dissatisfaction with the feedback, e.g. at staff/student meetings and NSS scores. Thus, improving students’ ability to use feedback could significantly enhance support of learning, change students’ experiences and perceptions of feedback, and so increase student satisfaction. ​ 

What Was Done?

The aim of this intervention was to help students to: understand better what good performance is; evaluate their current performance; and develop an action plan for how to bridge this gap (Nicol & MacFarlane-Dick, 2004).  A proforma was developed that guided students through reflection on previous feedback in order to feedforward to subsequent assessments.  Students are encouraged to consider how previous feedback can be relevant to helping to improve their performance on subsequent work by reviewing relevant documents to guide their reflections, e.g. previous submission and feedback, assessment guidance for previous and future assessments, and published papers as exemplars of good practice. Students were then asked to identify: strengths in their work that should be maintained in future; areas for improvement to be prioritised in future; and practical action points for how areas for growth might be worked on​.

What Worked Well?

This has been implemented in different ways:

- As a voluntary activity that students can complete in their own time (0.2% uptake);\
- As a voluntary activity where students can attend an additional face-to-face seminar and are lead through the activity by a GTA (12.7% uptake);
- As an in-class activity whereby students start the reflection during class time and complete it in their own time, but with the added incentive of requesting additional feedback from markers on subsequent assessments on the areas that they worked on (60-71% uptake).

Data on student participation demonstrated that uptake increased to the extent that students felt supported by staff through the process. Students commented that: they hadn’t spontaneously considered looking at previous feedback in order to help with future assessments, therefore they valued being encouraged to generalise across tasks; that it was helpful to have the opportunity to reflect; that they were able to learn from previous errors and identify areas for improvement; and that the task encourages objectivity in looking at their work, and increases motivation.  They also valued the additional and specific staff feedback requested. While staff commented that they thought the exercise was too long, the students did not raise this as a concern. Overall students commented that they would be very likely to engage in similar reflection in future, and those who did the activity on a voluntary basis commented that this should be made compulsory in future.

Benefits

Challenges