Feedback practices, peer assessment and feedback, and self assessment
Feedback Practices
For feedback to be effective, students need to make use of it – students need feedback designs that increase their understanding of performance criteria and standards, the role of feedback, how to respond to it constructively, and how to enact it in their subsequent work.
Consistency is also very important – lecturer feedback is more effective when it is part of an ongoing relationship with students with opportunities for dialogue.
The students should also be given an opportunity to work on the feedback given, even before summative submissions.
Feedback interventions can be helpful in building students’ understanding of assessment standards if they are done repeatedly.
Video feedback and screencast feedback are better than written feedback – can be more personal, expansive and elaborative
Elaborative feedback that explains how and why seems to help students improve their work more than corrective feedback that only points out or corrects problems.
Section 4:
Feedback has shifted to prioritising students generating (peer feedback), processing and using feedback. More importance is placed on how feedback is used to enhance their work.
Feedback literacy: “…involves seeking, generating and using feedback; making sound evaluative judgments; and working with emotions productively (Carless and Boud, 2018; Molloy, Boud and Henderson, 2020)”
Create a culture of feedback and make it a shared responsibility – imbed it into the course
educators are responsible for providing more detailed, higher quality and speedier feedback.
“…Basith, Rosmaiyadi, Triani and Fitri (2020) reported that students were satisfied with their interactions when the lecturer provided constructive feedback and when they had more opportunities to discuss it with course instructors. In the UK, Mulliner and Tucker (2017) reported that most staff and students thought that individual verbal (face-to-face) and individual typed feedback were effective forms of feedback.”
“MacKay et al (2019) studied the UK National Student Survey (NSS) responses for their institution and found that students described feedback as something educators do to students, suggesting a more passive role for students in the process…
For feedback to be useful, students first needed to understand what was expected of them and wanted examples of, or opportunities to, understand what constituted quality in their discipline.
Subsequently they wanted opportunities to improve their grades, but feedback was sometimes ineffective because it was either received too late or came only after work had been submitted for summative marking.
Dissatisfaction occurred when they perceived the feedback as vague, incongruent with the grade awarded or without opportunities for further dialogue. Francis et al (2019) argued that to overcome this dissatisfaction,… suggested increasing formative opportunities prior to summative work, where students can enact the feedback they receive and reducing feedback following summative work when there is no opportunity to enact it.
In Norway, Vattøy, Gamlem and Rogne (2021) found that teacher education students wanted specific, understandable and actionable feedback that was timely prior to summative submission. Students were frustrated and less likely to use feedback when it came after the work had been submitted for summative marking.”
Wei, Sun and Xu’s (2021) found clear differences in feedback expectations between first year and final year students:
First year students expected:
- personalised dialogic feedback, taskspecific and constructive feedback.
- more transmissive and evaluative forms of feedback
Final year students expected:
- more future-orientated solutions with built-in chances to enact this feedback
- wanting opportunities to enact, self-evaluate and improve future work
“…first-year students’ expectations of what constitutes feedback may have reflected their experiences prior to university. Educators’ approaches to transitioning students towards greater independence and agency is essential for their feedback literacy development over the longer term (Molloy et al, 2020).“
“The presence of grades often means that students don’t read the feedback or fail to enact the feedback (Pitt and Norton, 2017).“
“Students with lower grades checked (their grades/ feedback) the least…. Some students who achieved higher than their expected level of achievement ignored feedback…the students’ predetermined grade expectations also seemed to affect their subsequent processing of feedback.”
“Students need multiple opportunities for feedback and repeated interactions about feedback over a module and course.” Pg 54
“Students thought the feedback was more meaningful and actionable as it was tied to a subsequent opportunity to redraft the work. Students improved their grade by 10% from the draft to the final submission.” Alfalagg (2020)
“Negative emotions can interfere with students’ use of feedback information.”
“Rowe (2017) concluded that critical comments from educators can reduce students’ self-esteem and perceived self-efficacy and lead to negative emotional reactions. But Bulut, Cutumisu, Aquilina and Singh (2019) found that students responded poorly even to well-crafted feedback tailored to students’ strengths and weaknesses to elaborate deficient areas.”
“Most students found negatively worded feedback hard to process and did not see how it could help their future performance.”
“students reported positive affective engagement with supervisory feedback when they experienced support and genuine interest from their supervisors. Students also wanted feedback to be oral, written and positively worded, with detailed points for improvement.”
Negative emotional reactions can hinder students’ ability to process and act on the feedback.
This is more likely to happen if the feedback is harshly/ negatively worded OR if students are not used to receiving feedback that challenges their work.
Written vs audio / video feedback
Some students preferred audio whereas some preferred written > audio feedback felt more personalised. (Knauf (2016))
Especially when after the audio feedback was given, the grade was revealed = students found it to be a different experience compared to looking at their grades and if it met their expectations, they would ignore their feedback. (Woolstencroft and de Main (2021))
Higher achieving students reported re-listening to their feedback to make corrections
Types of feedback:
Written feedback:
- more directive
- direct, compact and concise
Video/ audio feedback:
- included more suggestions, explanations and elements of relationship-building through praise
- commentary as well as image, text and movement on screen which all contributed to the meaning-making process.
Spoken/ verbal feedback:
- repeat and recycle information, which helped reinforce points and clarify the intended meaning.
“Cavaleri et al (2019) marked the work and then compared both pieces of work for each student, in each condition, to see how much feedback had been addressed from the draft to the summative submission. 77% of the written-only feedback was used in a subsequent revision, compared to 88% of the video feedback. When students received video feedback they were 2.17 times more likely to make successful changes to their work than written feedback alone. This intervention seems to have had the most profound effect on students at the lower end of the grade spectrum. When receiving written feedback, lower achievers address only 53% of the feedback comments, compared to 78% when they received video feedback. Thus, video feedback may be an important element in closing attainment gaps.”
Exemplars
Samples of other people’s work to be looked at for reference – does not need to be the best work but should show a range of performance
Should be anonymous samples from previous cohorts, not same class.
“Studying exemplars can help students understand assessment criteria and appreciate assessment standards. In essence, they help students understand what constitutes quality (or lack therefore of) within a given assessment. Discussing exemplars among peers and with teachers can help students to develop their evaluative judgments and apply this new understanding to their own work (Carless and Chan, 2017; Carless, 2020; Nicol, 2021).”
“useful to them in learning about levels of quality and helped them interpret the criteria (Grainger, Heck and Carey, 2018)… helped students to analyse what they needed to do in the task ahead”
Lecture facilitation is really important in this process, especially if the feedback students generate is not critical or in-depth enough, or aligned to the criteria – “Carless and Chan (2017) argued that the lecturer’s facilitation, through elaborating students’ thoughts and judgements to unpick and develop their diverse opinions, was crucial to making the exemplar process successful”
Students also need repeated exposure to exemplars and the teacher’s guidance to be able to sufficiently and independently develop their evaluative judgement.
Peer assessment and feedback, and self assessment:
Peer feedback is designed to benefit the student giving feedback more than the person receiving it.
The process encourages students to actively engage in the marking criteria, helping them recognise quality work and then bring that critical eye back to their work.
Essentially, peer assessment helps develop reflective self-assessment and evaluative judgement > students understand what makes a good submission and therefore can take the steps and work towards it.
As this can be quite challenging for some students, use technology to allow anonymous feedback. Facilitate the dialogue between peers.
The students would benefit from feedback from peers as well as the lecturer
Section 5:
Peer assessment: , students make judgements about the quality of their peers’ work, give indicative grades and provide feedback comments designed to help their peers improve (Min, 2016)
The goal of peer assessment and peer feedback processes is to build students’ capacity to self-assess.
“Gezer-Templeton et al (2017) applied an emerging approach called “exam wrappers” to prompt students’ reflection in their exam preparation, improve their study skills and enhance future exam performance.”
“… students who generate feedback benefit more than students who receive it (Nicol, Thomson and Breslin, 2014)”
Bibliography:
Dr Pitt, E. and Prof Quinlan, K.M. (2022) “Impacts of higher education assessment and feedback policy and practice on students: a review of the literature 2016-2021.” Centre for the Study of Higher Education, University of Kent. Available at: https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/impacts-higher-education-assessment-and-feedback-policy-and-practice-students-review?_cldee=hxYRsJO9HcXlKmsJ_L49nlYSRMeNjDW7IQrFA5FFQgte0LinEFGwwJBKJVBmS54C&recipientid=contact-aae8d45c6694ed11aad10022481b584d-970a21d4cb6e4650ba9ca5f7d079559e&esid=1959bae0-1ea6-4cc8-9a34-9a5df578d08a (Accessed: 14 December 2022).