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Engaging Students With Assessment Feedback: What Works? FDTL 5 Project Dr Jill Millar Oxford Brookes Project Research Officer. Assertion: Understanding staff student interaction is central to engaging students with assessment feedback.
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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 • References • Adams, 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. Business School