Engaging Students With Assessment Feedback: What Works? FDTL 5 Project Dr Jill Millar Oxford Brookes Project Research Officer

1
Engaging Students With Assessment Feedback What
Works?FDTL 5 ProjectDr Jill Millar Oxford
Brookes Project Research Officer
Assertion Understanding staff student
interaction is central to engaging students with
assessment feedback.
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Engaging Students With Assessment Feedback What
Works?FDTL 5 Project

• ..giving and receiving feedback occurs within.
  complex contexts, and so is mediated by power
  relationships and the nature of the predominant
  discourse...
• (HIGGINS R, HARTLEY P AND SKELTON A, 2001.
  Getting the Message Across the problem of
  communicating assessment feedback. Teaching in
  Higher Education, 6 (2), pp 269-274)

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Engaging Students With Assessment Feedback What
Works?FDTL 5 Project

• Feedback and staff student contact
• Literature suggests that
• Students want the feedback process to be
  explicitly fair (Holmes and Smith, 2003)
• Students feel that it is only fair that they
  should receive feedback having done the work
  (Higgins et al, 2002)
• Some (male?) students want marks as feedback as a
  form of recognition (Adams, Thomas and King,
  2000)
• Some students see feedback as part of the service
  that they are paying for (Higgins et al, 2002)

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Engaging Students With Assessment Feedback What
Works?FDTL 5 Project

• Feedback and staff student contact
• We have found that
• They know me by name nowIts nice you feel more
  at ease
• I felt like discussing my feedback but to be
  honest I didnt know how to approach my tutor
• You just get that feeling at times that they are
  that busy that they dont have time to speak to
  you on an individual basis
• You feel like he might say why doesnt this
  student know what she is talking about?
• He just said No

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Engaging Students With Assessment Feedback What
Works?FDTL 5 Project

• Taking this further- the academic discourse
• Literature suggests that
• Feedback tends to be categorical in tone, and
  advice is not always explicit (Mutch 2003)
• There is not necessarily a shared set of
  understandings between staff and students,
  nonetheless what is said is shaped by academic
  discourse (McCune 2004)
• There should be Opportunities for engagement in
  dialogue (Hyatt 2005)

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Engaging Students With Assessment Feedback What
Works?FDTL 5 Project

• Academic discourse
• We have found that
• the feedback which I did get was pretty poor.
  There were 9 words written on the evaluation
  formOne just said evidence next to a particular
  comment. Was there enough evidence, was there
  evidence of evidence, or did I need to improve my
  evidence?

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Engaging Students With Assessment Feedback What
Works?FDTL 5 Project

• Why does feedback matter?
• The starting point of this FDTL project is that
  feedback supports learning.
• Opportunities for engagement in dialogue
  between markers and student-writers should be
  actively encouraged... offering them a position
  from which to challenge, a critical
• inclusion in the community, so they are not
  simply disempowered apprentices whose role is to
  follow and reproduce. (Hyatt, 2005 p. 351)

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Engaging Students With Assessment Feedback What
Works?FDTL 5 Project

• Tentative conclusions
• To secure engagement with feedback it may help to
  develop strategies which support interaction,
  mimicking the positive dialogue students seem to
  want.

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Engaging Students With Assessment Feedback What
Works?FDTL 5 Project

• References
• Adams, C.,Thomas, R., and King, K., 2000.
  Business Students Ranking of Reasons for
  Assessment Gender Differences. Innovations in
  Education and Training International, 37, 93 pp.
  234-243.
• Higgins, R., Hartley, P., and Skelton, A., 2001.
  Getting the Message Across the problem of
  communicating assessment feedback. Teaching in
  Higher Education, 6 (2), pp. 269-274.
• Holmes, L., and Smith, L., 2003. Student
  Evaluation of Faculty Grading Methods. Journal of
  Education for Business July/August, pp. 318-323.
• Hyatt, D., 2005. Yes, a very good point! a
  critical genre analysis of a corpus of feedback
  commentaries on Master of Education assignments.
  Teaching in Higher Education, 10 (3), pp.
  339-353.
• McCune, V., 2004. Development of first- year
  students conceptions of essay writing. Higher
  Education, 47, pp. 257-282.
• Mutch, A., 2003. Exploring the practice of
  feedback to students. Active Learning in Higher
  Education, 4 (1), pp. 24-38.