This paper considers feedback in the context of modularised programmes in higher education in the UK. It is argued that the self-contained nature of modular assessment may limit feedback dialogue between staff and students to assignment specific issues, and may impede student progress towards holistic programme level aims and outcomes. A feedback profiling tool was developed to categorise feedback on draft and final work. The analysis of feedback on 63 samples of draft work and 154 samples of final work showed different patterns. There were more feedback comments on draft work, and the feedback comments were dominated by advice and critique, while the feedback comments on the final work were overwhelmingly dominated by praise. This pattern of feedback is problematised in terms of feed forward from one module to the next as students work towards the development of programme level outcomes. Ipsative feedback (on progress) and feed forward in terms of disciplinary specific skills and programme level outcomes are recommended to enable students to act on feedback on end-of-module work, and develop students' capacity to recontextualise disciplinary specific skills throughout a programme. Some developmental applications for the feedback profiling tool are also suggested.
If you are seeking a better way to give feedback to student writers, dialogic writing assessment may be for you. E ducation leaders are showing new interest in personalized learning and assessment (Barnum, 2018). For teachers of literacy, this shift is an opportunity to consider formative writing assessment practices anew. In this article, we explore the potential of dialogic writing assessment (Beck, 2018) to provide such opportunities through individualized scaffolding of students' writing processes. Dialogic writing assessment is an approach to conducting writing conferences that unites conversation with what is traditionally known as thinking aloud. It foregrounds students' composing processes to reveal and address the obstacles that interfere with those processes: The teacher encourages students to verbalize their composing processes and then attempts to support those processes with prompts and questions. These prompts and questions, along with written materials that the teacher offers during the session, act as scaffolds for students' writing processes.Scaffolding (Wood, Bruner, & Ross, 1976) of literacy processes can enhance students' capacity for meaning making (e.g., Hinchman & Chandler-Olcott, 2017). In this article, we present portraits of several teachers' practice to illustrate how skilled interplay between assessment and instruction based on close observation of student writing processes is involved in achieving this goal. Rather than proposing one best way of practicing scaffolding in dialogic writing assessment, we offer multiple examples of practice that we consider noteworthy for demonstrating close alignment between assessment and instruction. We also explore how this scaffolding can be "contextualized…in light of the value systems" (Smagorinsky, 2018b, p. 255) that shape teachers' practice, tracing the ways in which their scaffolding decisions are personally and institutionally specific. We hope that by highlighting the essential role of teacher judgment in matching instruction with learner needs, this depiction will serve as a gentle challenge to one-size-fits-all models of effective writing instruction.We describe the background and contexts of the participating teachers, summarize the design of the study, and offer descriptive portraits of the teachers' work with students. These portraits are designed to answer two research questions:1. How did variation in three teachers' support for students' composing processes in dialogic writing assessment show responsiveness to the students' individual needs?2. How did the teachers' support reflect their goals for writing and their institutional contexts?
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