Velda highlights the importance of meaningful dialogue and suggests realistic and practical strategies to improve feedback culture in the context of current Higher Education funding and workload models. Professor Velda McCune is the Deputy Director at the Institute for Academic Development and Head of the Learning and Teaching Team. This post belongs to Mar-May Learning & Teaching Enhancement theme: Assessment and feedback revisited↗️
I’ve recently been reading our National Student Survey open-ended comments about assessment. One thing that struck me in the negative comments, is how many students across all three Colleges felt that marking was inconsistent, feedback was unclear, or that they didn’t understand what they needed to do to be successful. So, what is going on here? Our markers are highly skilled and the students receiving this feedback are generally well qualified and seem to have read their feedback, yet something is still going wrong.
I think that part of the answer lies in the nature of language and communication. There is a widespread belief that if we just write things down clearly (maybe with an agreed rubric) then everyone can easily understand what is expected in assessed work. This is not true. Both written and spoken language are always to some extent ambiguous, partly because the parties involved don’t have fully shared histories or frames of reference (Anderson and McCune, 2013)↗️. Here is an example from Lillis and Turner (2001, p. 61)↗️ that illustrates this point.
Tutor feedback: “The discussion of poverty and the disagreements surrounding its definition are well made but for this essay needed to be reduced down to what you feel is the most relevant aspect of this discussion.”
Student response: “How do you know which bits are worth defining and which bits aren’t? Cause for me, everything is new and I think, well maybe, you know, she’s (tutor) looking for this. Or maybe this is more important to her, I mean I don’t know, I can’t pinpoint things. Okay, this is my subject now, but this is all new to me.”
So we can see that the word ‘relevance’ here holds specific contextualised meaning for the tutor that the student does not yet share, not having been part of this knowledge community for long enough. For this student to fully understand what her feedback means, she will need to spend considerable time in dialogue with her subject area learning its histories, norms and traditions.
Following on from this, when busy staff with different backgrounds or levels of experience mark and give feedback, there is a pretty high chance that they won’t be fully on the same page about what makes for good academic work either (Sadler, 2005)↗️. Then we have our students who are much less experienced and often are working across different subject areas with different types of feedback being given. Not surprisingly, students are often confused or feel they are being treated unfairly, even if a lot of effort has been put into assessment guidance and feedback. More generally, feedback is an embedded social practice and ‘unfolding relational process of meaning making’ (Gravett and Carless, 2024, p.144)↗️. In these processes, having a sense that your ways of knowing and being are valued and that you matter are core to positive experiences of learning (Gravett and Carless, 2024)↗️.
So, what can we do about this that’s realistic in the context of current Higher Education funding and workload models? This is very difficult but I do think there are some good possibilities. Firstly, I think it is really worth the effort to get all markers together every year or two to blind mark a few of the same pieces of work together and discuss any disparities in their marking and feedback. The last time I did this on a new programme we were quite shocked by how different our perspectives were! This activity is especially important with less experienced markers like tutors and demonstrators. While this does take time, I think that it will probably make things easier in the end than dealing with the student dissatisfaction and queries that can result from inconsistent marking and feedback.
Then we need to find ways to help our students engage in meaningful dialogue about what makes for good academic work. Realistically in the current context this may need to be done in large tutorial or workshop groups, we’re not often going to get time for one-to-one conversations. I think it is well worth dedicating several small group classes to dialogue of this kind, especially when students are making any kind of transition. It can save so many problems later on. While I know many staff are uncomfortable using exemplars of past students’ work, I think it is more helpful than harmful. Using diverse exemplars can help to avoid students trying to replicate good work in a formulaic way. Getting students to all read the same exemplars in a group setting, discuss with one another what grades and feedback they would give and why, and then discussing that with teachers in plenary can be a great way to provide a shared frame of reference and to debunk misconceptions.
With larger groups, having a teacher talk aloud about what makes for good work and using a digital response system like Wooclap↗️ can work. So, maybe start the talk by explaining some of the ways in which assessment in your course might be different from what students have done previously or in another subject area. Talk about the most common things students lose marks for and why. Then move on to explain what you mean by comments like ‘you need to give evidence to support this assertion’. Say what good evidence is in your subject area. Explain some of the ways good evidence in one subject area might not be seen as good evidence in another. Show some examples of student work that demonstrate good use of evidence. Then use Wooclap to ask students what they think of some other examples.
Iterative formative feedback can be a very powerful form of asynchronous dialogue that enables better student understanding of what makes for good academic work. So, start with a compulsory but low stakes partial piece of work that contributes to a larger piece. (It needs to be compulsory or more vulnerable or weaker students won’t complete it). Give feedback on that partial piece that makes it as clear as possible how to do better on the next submission. Then get students to submit a more extended version of the same piece and take note of where they misunderstood your previous feedback and see what you can do to put that right. Repeat as often as workloads allow. Assessments based on portfolios that bring together multiple drafts of work and link them to later work are a good mechanism for this kind of work. What is needed here is sustained interaction over time that will help students really grasp what makes for good work in a particular context. Whichever of these strategies we choose, we need to create good opportunities for students actively to seek out and process feedback (Gravett and Carless, 2024)↗️.
To fully enable strong assessment and feedback practices across the University I believe there are some policy and strategic changes that need to happen. Higher education funding has to change to enable us to spend more time per student on assessment and feedback. Our recognition and reward processes have to value the course and programme leads who take the time and care to coordinate and evaluate good feedback practices in their areas. We need to reward the colleagues who put time and care into supporting inexperienced markers, like tutors and demonstrators. Our workload models need to be more realistic about the time it takes to give good guidance and feedback on assessed work. This needs to take into account the diversity of our students, the transitions our students are making, and our students’ experience with doing academic work in English. I think we should also take into account that inexperienced markers, like tutors and demonstrators, can’t be expected to mark as quickly as someone with 20 or 30 years of experience.
Assessment and feedback are by far the most powerful drivers of student learning so it’s worth getting this right.
REFERENCES
Anderson, C. and McCune, V. (2013). Fostering meaning: Fostering community↗️. Higher Education 66, 283-296.
Gravett, K. and Carless, D. (2024). Feedback literacy-as-event: relationality, space and temporality in feedback encounters↗️. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 49 (2), 142-153.
Lillis, T. and Turner, J. (2001). Student writing in higher education: Contemporary confusion, traditional concerns↗️. Teaching in Higher Education 6(1), 57-68.
Sadler, D. (2005). Interpretation of criteria-based assessment and grading in higher education↗️. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education 30(2), 175-194.
