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

Maximising learning payoff through feedback

The following suggestions are adapted from Race (2005) and aim to give you some practical ways in which you can increase the learning payoff caused by your feedback to students.

1. Provide students with a list of feedback comments given to a similar assignment prior to them submitting their own. You can then ask students, for example in a large-group session, to attempt to work out what kind of marks an essay with specific comments might be awarded. This helps them to see the links between feedback comments and levels of achievement, and can encourage them to be more receptive to critical comments on their own future work.
2. Let students have feedback comments on their assignments prior to them receiving the actual mark. Encourage them to use the feedback comments to estimate what kind of mark they will receive. This could be then used as the basis of an individual or group dialogue on how marks or grades are worked out.
3. Focus your comments on students' work, not on their personalities. Comments need therefore to be about 'your work', rather than 'you'. This is particularly important when feedback is critical.
4. Get students to look back positively after receiving your feedback. For example, ask them to revisit their work and identify what were their most successful parts of the assignment, on the basis of having now read your feedback. Sometimes students are so busy reading and feeling depressed by the negative comments that they fail to see that there are positive aspects too.

5. Ask students to respond selectively to your feedback on their assignments. This could for example include asking them to complete sentences such as:
   • 'the part of the feedback that puzzled me most was...'
   • 'the comment that rang most true for me was....'
   • 'I don't get what you mean when you say...'
   • 'I would welcome some advice on...'.
6. Ask students to send you an email after they have received your feedback, focusing on their feelings. In particular, this might help you to understand what emotional impact your feedback is having on individual students. It can be useful to give them a menu of words and phrases to underline or ring, for example including exhilarated, very pleased, miserable, shocked, surprised, encouraged, disappointed, helped, daunted, relieved (and so on).
7. Ask students to tell you what they would like you to stop doing, start doing and continue doing in relation to the feedback you give them. This is likely to help you to understand which parts of your feedback are helpful to specific students, as well as giving them ownership of the aspects of feedback that they would like you to include next time.
8. Don't miss out on noticing the difference. Comment positively where you can see that students have incorporated action resulting from your advice given on their previous assignment. This will encourage them to see the learning and assessment processes as continuous.