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Assessment and Feedback (A&F) in HE

This is an entry page into pages on A&F (assessment and feedback) in HE. This began with my involvement with the REAP project (April 2005 - July 2007); and with followup work.

Contents (click to jump to a section)

• Design Principles
• Interventions (some learning designs for feedback)
• Links to other websites on A&F
• 5 important websites on A&F
• Transformation: How to achieve change in practice
• QEE website

Design Principles

• Rival sets of design principles for assessment
• Some proposed new principles
• My heresies and anti-principles on A&F
• Eight tips for enhancing a proactive approach in students (by David Nicol): "Make feedback work for you".
  • A webpage: the panel on its right hand side shortlists the tips, the main text expands on each one.
  • Leaflet summary (PDF) (Print as 2-sided colour A4; then fold once to give 4 X A5 panels.)
  • Local copy of leaflet
  • Workshop for students based on the 8 tips

Do students actually want or need feedback?

• Many publications have reported that many students do not read or use feedback.
• See my paper on multiple feedback loops which argues that improving technical skill or understanding is only one use of feedback, and not necessarily the important one for learners.
• "... like most normally constituted writers Martin had no use for any candid opinion that was not wholly favourable."
  "He had shown his letter to Maturin partly as a mark of confidence and esteem ... and partly so that Maturin might praise it, possibly adding a few well-turned phrases; for like most normally constituted writers Martin had no use for any candid opinion that was not wholly favourable." -- P.O'Brian (1984 / 2003) The far side of the world p.131
  N.B. this may be an entirely normal learner attitude; and so important for good teaching to grasp. See Mitra's use of standin "grandmothers" to achieve wildly impressive learning results, precisely by supplying uncritical positive feedback: [ Mitra's TED talk;   Youtube piece about it   The project ] (I.e. "grandmothers" supply NO informative but demotivating teacherly "feedback" i.e. negative criticism, which makes teachers self-important, but is essentially about telling learners, and so is anti-constructivist). Thus it is rational, and supported by considerable evidence, to consider the whole usual approach to feedback as counter-productive.

Oh well, back to the bad old assumptions ...

Interventions (some learning designs for feedback)

• Reciprocal Peer Critiquing
• Feedback calendars
• One Minute Papers
• Elective feedback
• Self-assessment. A simple step is to require, for all work, that the student makes a serious attempt to estimate a mark for their work, and submits that (perhaps in a sealed envelope). This both gives them practice at making the judgement (to improve future self-regulation); and can be used by the tutor to guide formative comments (is the student misguided about the standard required; or judges accurately but just doesn't know how to improve their work).
  Note that when I got my students to do both formative self-assessment and elective feedback, they said it didn't add anything. Requiring a mark might add something; but for formative purposes, perhaps elective feedback and self-assessment may cover the same ground w.r.t. intrinsic benefit to the learner. (Getting comments from others however adds some value).
• Feedback vivas. Two teachers, one student, 10 minutes: dialogue about a piece of submitted student work and the written feedback by tutors on it returned at least two days before the viva. This achieves staff-student dialogue about feedback, though at a cost.
• Prompted student processing of feedback. I've held meetings with students to discuss written feedback I've given them. Not a lot of discussion happened. Better has been to get them to write brief answers to questions on it, and what they will do with it. This achieved staff-student (and peer) dialogue about feedback.
• EVS mediated class tests. Class tests mediated by electronic voting systems (EVS), provided they can be expressed in multiple choice question format, have the feedback advantage of on the spot turnaround (within the hour, not 14 days: 2-3 orders of magnitude faster), per-item feedback on personal right/wrong and the group's performance, plus explanations as required, and of dialogue about the feedback with both teacher and peers. Here students might work for half an hour on paper on a set of questions; then they key in the answers they have calculated; and the lecturer responds to the displayed, aggregated results: moving swiftly over unproblematic questions, and explaining those questions where substantial numbers got the wrong answer. Besides providing instant feedback to students without staff labour, I have seen students question staff for clarification at this stage, thus essentially making the feedback interactive and responsive, while also shared by the whole class. This, even though much cheaper, is qualitatively superior to the usual written feedback we give students, which must often miss the mark because it has to assume some level of understanding which we cannot check. (See also here.)
• Ipsative feedback ("ipsative" means compared to the person's own performance). The idea is, when commenting on a piece of work, to link the comments to the student's previous work and the previous feedback given on it: for each issue, have they improved, stayed the same, got worse? This is best supported by using a) a structured feedback form (e.g. one section per marking criterion); b) digital records so the marker can summon up the previous feedback that student got (on the structured form).
  Jo Royle has had good responses from this technique on Access courses, and at GIC. Her email is: j.royle@educ.gla.ac.uk
  C.O'Siochru at Liverpool Hope reports feedback on a year 2 project to developing the year project.
• 2-D feedback: letting the learner know how they are doing both relative to their previous performance (ipsative) and relative the rest of the class (e.g. their rank in class, or a grade if they know what the grades mean in terms of other students' performance). (Note that neither of these two useful dimensions is the rather unhelpful one mostly used in HEIs of some absolute scale with grade descriptors, which however doesn't give the student any usable comparisons for the mark they receive. Like giving a volume in minims, a weight in scruples, or a temperature in degrees Réaumur: numbers actually only are useful to people who already remember the numbers of some cases measured on the same scale as comparison points.)
• Hanscomb's virtues. When teachers mark a piece of student work, we often involuntarily perceive or attribute characteristics to the student to do with the way they did it: procrastination, showing contempt for the marker, showing undue conscientiousness, .... The educational issue is: should (HE) teachers pay any attention to this? On the one hand, if we want to focus on students' learning we should pay attention to results not to their personal habits such as the clothes they wear, whether they work at night or day, whether they are tall, or bald. On the other hand, employers explicitly ask us to comment in letters of reference on some of these attributes (e.g. diligence, self-starting, timeliness, sickness absences, ...); and most programmes in fact give directive study skill advice. If we were to give feedback based on these attributions, it would be a new dimension to feedback on student work, but a logical continuation of the role of study advisor.
• Feedback on work related attributes. Lorna Morrow is developing a feedback sheet and procedure for doing a version of Hanscomb's idea, but focussed on work related attributes, in this this department.

Links to other websites on A&F