In at the Deep End - Starting to teach in Higher Education

Table of Contents

1. Welcome
2. Section 1: Learning
3. Section 2: Teaching
4. Section 3: Assessment
   1. Assessment, marking and feedback to students
   2. Summative and formative assessment
   3. Assessment matters to students
   4. The sharp end of learning and teaching
   5. Fit-for-purpose assessment is valid, reliable, transparent and authentic - and manageable!
   6. Beyond exams, essays and reports
   7. Setting questions for essays and exams
   8. Designing marking schemes
   9. Marking students' work
   10. Making the most of feedback to students
   11. Maximising learning payoff through feedback
5. References

Making the most of feedback to students

It used to be the case that there were two main ways of giving students feedback on their work:

• written (handwritten) comments on students' work
• face-to-face feedback, where tutors discussed students' work with them, individually or in small-group tutorials.

Although these two methods are still in use, in many disciplines there are just too many students needing too much feedback for either process to be practicable any longer. Fortunately, word-processing technology and communications technologies have extended our repertoire of methods of giving students written feedback. We can now choose from options including:

• statement banks, from which we can draw often-needed feedback explanations from a collection of frequently used comments which apply to the work of many students, and stitch these comments together to make a composite feedback message to individual students.
• emailing feedback directly to students so that they can study our feedback in the comfort of privacy at their computers.
• building an overall general collection of feedback comments to the class as a whole, based on common errors and frequent difficulties, posting this on an electronic discussion board which each student can view, and then emailing individual students only with any specific additional feedback they need.
• using assignment return sheets, where the feedback agenda has already been prepared (for example based on the intended learning outcomes or the assessment criteria for the assignment), enabling us to map our feedback comments to students more systematically. It is worth checking whether your programme may have an agreed feedback form sheet that they prefer you to use.
• creating an overall feedback report on a task set to a large group of students, covering all the most important mistakes and misunderstandings, referring individual students to the sections relevant to their own work, and adding minimal individual feedback to students, addressing aspects of their work not embraced by the general report.
• model answers can show students a lot of detail which can be self-explanatory to them, allowing them to compare the model answers with their own work and see what they've missed out or got wrong.
• giving feedback in a lecture, allowing you to cover all the most important points you need to make, and also allowing students to see how their own work compares with that of their fellow students.
• using the 'track changes' facilities in word-processing packages to edit students' electronically-submitted essays and reports, so they can see in colour the changes we've made to their work at the click of a mouse on their own screens. This sounds complex, but in practice can be a very quick way of giving a lot of detailed feedback, and the feedback is in exactly the right place amid their words, not in a margin or over the page.

As mentioned earlier, it is common practice at Teesside to give formative work and formative feedback through your modules and programmes (see the Rough Guide entitled Formative Work and Formative Feedback for ideas).

Feedback to students should be:

1. Timely - the sooner the better. There has been plenty of research into how long after the learning event it takes for the effects of feedback to be significantly eroded. Ideally feedback should be received within a day or two, and even better almost straightaway, as is possible (for example) in some computer-aided learning situations, and equally in some face-to-face contexts. When marked work is returned to students weeks (or even months) after submission, feedback is often totally ignored because it bears little relevance to students' current needs then. Many institutions nowadays specify in their Student Charters or student handbooks that work should be returned within a set period of time, for example two to three weeks, enabling students to derive greater benefits from feedback. When feedback is received very quickly, it is much more effective, as students can still remember exactly what they were thinking as they addressed each task. The advantage of formative activities is that they provide feedback on preparing the assignment itself (for example via an essay plan or electronic quizzes). Students can see how they are progressing as they learn. This approach may make them less anxious about final summative marked work and feedback as they will have a better idea of how they are doing (see the Rough Guide to Formative Work and Formative Feedback).
2. Personal and individual. Feedback needs to fit each student's achievement, individual nature and personality. Global ways of compiling and distributing feedback can reduce the extent of ownership which students take over the feedback they receive, even when the quality and amount of feedback is increased. Each student is still a person. There are ways to encourage students to assess their own performance, for example by getting them to fill in a self-assessment sheet completed against the assessment criteria. Another useful exercise is to ask them what areas they would like the formative feedback to focus on.
3. Articulate. Students should not have to struggle to make sense of our feedback. Whether our messages are congratulatory or critical, it should be easy for students to work out exactly what we are trying to tell them. They should not have to read each sentence more than once, trying to work out what we are really saying.
4. Empowering. If feedback is intended to strengthen and consolidate learning, we need to make sure it doesn't dampen learning down. This is easier to ensure when feedback is positive of course, but we need to look carefully at how best we can make critical feedback equally empowering to students. We must not forget that often feedback is given and received in a system where power is loaded towards the provider of the feedback rather than the recipient - for example where we are driving assessment systems.
5. Manageable. There are two sides to this. From our point of view, designing and delivering feedback to students could easily consume all the time and energy we have - it is an endless task. But also from the students' point of view, getting too much feedback can result in them not being able to sort out the important feedback from the routine feedback, reducing their opportunity to benefit from the feedback they need most.
6. Developmental. Feedback should open doors, not close them. In this respect, we have to be particularly careful with the words we use when giving feedback to students. Clearly, words with such 'final language' implications as 'weak' or 'poor' cause irretrievable breakdowns in the communication between assessor and student. To a lesser extent, even positive words such as 'excellent' can cause problems when feedback on the next piece of work is only 'very good' - why wasn't it excellent again? In all such cases it is better to praise exactly what was very good or excellent in a little more detail, rather than take the short cut of just using the adjectives themselves.