Business School

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.

Business School

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)

Business School

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)

Business School

Engaging Students With Assessment Feedback: What Works?FDTL 5 Project

Feedback and staff student contact

We have found that:• “They know me by name now…It’s nice you feel

more at ease”• “I felt like discussing [my feedback] but to be

honest I didn’t know how to approach [my tutor]• “You just get that feeling at times that they are

that busy that they don’t have time to speak to you on an individual basis”

• “You feel like he might say why [doesn’t] this student know what she is talking about?”

• “He just said ‘No’”

Business School

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)

Business School

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 form…One 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…?”

Business School

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)

Business School

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.

Business School

Engaging Students With Assessment Feedback: What Works?

FDTL 5 Project

ReferencesAdams, 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.