There are many pressures on academics to 'satisfy' students' needs for feedback, not least the inclusion of questions about feedback in the National Student Survey. Many authors have commentated on the lack of student engagement with summative feedback while most believe that feedback is necessary to improve individual student performance.Several authors have looked at a range of reasons why students do not collect their feedback but this paper investigates how many students collected summative feedback and why they did so. This paper outlines an action research based intervention which involved offering feedback 'on demand' to undergraduate students and utilises access statistics data from the Virtual Learning Environment to identify the actual rate of feedback collection by students. We found a discernible preference for seeking feedback where the difference between the expected grade and the actual grade was greater. A student survey and the VLE access data both indicated that students were satisfied with a few short comments and a marking grid, if the mark was similar to their expectations.We argue that it is not resource efficient or effective for academic staff to provide detailed individual feedback to all students. Students should be offered a hierarchy of feedback on demand which would allow some of the effort to be reallocated from summative feedback to formative assessment and feedback.
This article provides an introduction into the innovative use of the methodological approach of Mediated Discourse Analysis (MDA) and illustrates this with examples from an interventionist insider action research study. An overview of the method, including its foundation and association with the analysis of practice and how it can be situated within a reflexive ethnographic and critical realist stance, is presented. It offers samples of findings and analysis for each of the different aspects of method, structured by a set of heuristic questions, as well as an example showing the possibilities of theory development. The article constructs and shows an analytical pathway for HRD researchers to use MDA and concludes with a discussion about the advantages of utilizing MDA, in terms of theory and practice, as well as the practical issues in conducting an MDA study. The implication for the HRD research community is that MDA is a new, innovative, and germane approach for analyzing HRD practice within organizational settings.
PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore who small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) owner–managers consider as key stakeholders for their business for helping increase productivity and the nature of the stakeholders' impact.Design/methodology/approachThe study uses the Lego Serious Play methodology and narrative analysis in a focus group setting.FindingsThe analysis revealed a narrow depth of field of productivity stakeholders and identified critical narratives, involving close stakeholders which could constrain productivity. Lack of information on current and/or future productivity states, and a social brake due to the potential impact on employees are two at the forefront of owner–manager perspectives. The study also identified the importance of internal and external champions to improve productivity and re-enforced the significance of skills gaps, the role of Further Education providers and other infrastructure assets.Research limitations/implicationsThe purposiveness sample of the single focus group setting results in a lack of generalizability, but provides potential for replication and transposability based on the generic type of stakeholders discussed. The work highlights the potential to further enhance the constituent attributes of stakeholder salience.Practical implicationsThere is a potential for different network agents to increase their collaboration to create a more coherent narrative for individual productivity investment opportunities and for policy makers to consider how to leverage this.Social implicationsThe findings suggest that the implications of deskilling and job loss are major factors to be considered in the policy discourse. SMEs are less likely to pursue productivity improvements in a low growth setting because of their local social implications.Originality/valueThe study is innovative in using Lego to elucidate narratives in relation to both stakeholder identification and their contributions to productivity improvement impact in a UK SME context. The study introduces an innovative stakeholder orbital map and further develops the stakeholder salience concept; both useful for the future conceptual and empirical work.
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to report on a research project, using intervention research (IR), which aims to identify how a higher education institution could develop process improvement (PI) capability. Design/methodology/approach The paper adopts a practice perspectives of routines, and classifies and catalogues the potential routines that could form PI capability. The development of these routines are investigated using the constructive research approach, a form of IR), in the action research mode. Within this approach, the methodology of mediated discourse analysis was employed to trace the empirical trajectory of the routine development, in a student management office within the context of an improvement project by the institutions PI unit. Findings Of relative significance is the implication that there is a small group of initialising PI practices which are accessible to practitioners, in contrast to a large set of critical success factors. Second, these PI practices transcend particular methodologies, meaning their development can be incorporated into customised, contextualised methodologies, by individual organisations. Practical implications The set of PI practices identified are able to be enacted by practitioners and are not dependent on macro-management factors. Second they are relatively simple to understand and are not associated with any particular improvement fad or fashion. Originality/value The study contributes to the appreciation of PI in higher education as a capability, and outlines the potential array of routines that could constitute that capability. It provides a theoretical view on how key PI routines are developed in an organisational field, and a more nuanced and richer view of “process mapping” and its effect on other PI practices.
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