Is the feedback in higher education assessment worth the paper it is written on? Teachers' reflections on their practices

Bailey, Richard; Garner, Mark

doi:10.1080/13562511003620019

Cited by 170 publications

(109 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…However a number of studies have suggested that the feedback students are receiving is doing little to improve their learning (Bailey & Garner, 2010;Sadler, 2010). Part of the difficulty arises from changes in thinking in recent years about what the exact purpose of feedback is, how students engage with feedback and how they use it to improve their future assessed work.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Now that’s the feedback I want!’ Students’ reactions to feedback on graded work and what they do with it

Pitt

Norton

2016

Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education

171

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Since the introduction of the National Student Survey in 2005, like many other institutions, the university where this study took place has expended substantial effort in improving the quality of feedback to university students. However, despite much research, changes in pedagogical approaches and shifts in conceptual understanding related to feedback practice, assessment and feedback still receive the lowest satisfaction ratings in the NSS. Lecturers are discouraged when students fail to take note of their feedback or sometimes do not collect assignments that have been marked. Understanding why feedback is not always acted upon remains an important area for researchers. This paper reports on an in-depth interview study with 14 final year undergraduates reflecting on their perceptions of feedback written on marked assignments by selecting examples of what they considered to be 'good' and 'bad' work. Findings suggested that emotional reactions play a significant part in determining how students will act on the feedback they receive and the concept of 'emotional backwash' is introduced.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Now that’s the feedback I want!’ Students’ reactions to feedback on graded work and what they do with it

Pitt

Norton

2016

Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education

171

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“…For instance, Bailey and Garner (2010) interviewed 48 university teachers in the United Kingdom regarding their perceptions of WFB and discovered wide divergence among various teachers' beliefs about feedback. The teachers were even unsure of the purpose of providing WFB.…”

Section: Utility Purpose and Focus Of Wfbmentioning

confidence: 99%

Teachers’ Perceptions and Practices of Written Feedback in Higher Education

Gul¹,

Tharani²,

Lakhani³

et al. 2016

WJE

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This mixed-methods research aimed to understand the practices and perceptions of teachers regarding written feedback. For this purpose, a survey was administered to 150 teachers forming a non-probability sample, who were working in various universities in Karachi. The disciplines chosen for the study included nursing, applied linguistics, medicine and education departments in institutes of higher education situated in Karachi. Before sampling, initial screening was done to obtain a list of institutes which provide written feedback on students' assignments. Two homogenous groups of teachers by discipline (nursing and education) were then selected for focus group discussions. It was found that most teachers consider written feedback an important tool for guiding and helping students improve their work. In fact, they consider written feedback as important as verbal feedback. Teachers also recognized the importance of discussing the written feedback with the students but they rarely did so because of time constraints. Most teachers preferred to directly fix students' errors instead of providing feedback to enable them to correct those errors by themselves. While less than half of the participants used a checklist for grading, others used annotation. Several factors were found to have a great influence on the amount and quality of feedback. The most significant factor was whether teachers had formal training in providing feedback. Only 17% of the participants in this study had proper training to give written feedback. They also identified several environmental and personal factors that had an impact on their feedback practices including time, the relationship between the teacher and individual students, and, most importantly, the policies and culture of the institutes.

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“…More broadly, engaging students with feedback intended to support their long-term learning is equally problematic. For example, some tutors complain that students often fail to even collect their written feedback (Bailey andGarner 2010, Carless 2006), while considerable written comments by tutors, even if read, can still be poorly used by students (Dysthe 2011). It is therefore 'not inevitable that students will read and pay attention to feedback even when that feedback is lovingly crafted and provided promptly' (Gibbs and Simpson 2004: 20).…”

Section: Feedback In Academic Writing Support Servicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Limitations of Corrective Feedforward: A Call for Resubmission Practices to become Learning-oriented

Carver

2017

JOAW

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As part of well-planned formative assessment, feedback can help students to understand the demands of a summative assessment task, evaluate their current level of performance, and then find ways to close the gap. As students take a more active role in this process, their feedback can be thought of as becoming 'feedforward' since it serves a specific purpose and drives student action. As the value of formative assessment design is becoming emphasised in higher education, summative assessment practices need to be re-evaluated in terms of how well they support learning as opposed to just supporting valid judgements of student performance. However, despite significant discussion of Assessment for Learning and Learning-Oriented Assessment, resubmission practices are largely overlooked even though resubmission can be a key event in whether students are retained.As part of a learning support department's effort to provide effective feedback on academic writing, students referred for support were offered two types of feedback: one was simple correction, the other was in-depth dialogic feedback which followed "feedback for learning" guidance (Askew and Lodge 2000). Student engagement with the two types of feedback was analysed by looking at the changes students made to their work and feedback from their subject tutor (including the resubmission grade). The tutor's feedback was also analysed to see if any intentions for the resubmission task could be inferred.Results suggest that corrective feedback is highly efficient in enabling students to pass resubmissions and that more in-depth feedback is much less efficient. This paper highlights some of the ways in which resubmission practices can unknowingly encourage surface approaches, and suggests some ideas for how learning support can better align with subject tutors to enable resubmission to become more learning-oriented.

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Is the feedback in higher education assessment worth the paper it is written on? Teachers' reflections on their practices

Cited by 170 publications

References 15 publications

‘Now that’s the feedback I want!’ Students’ reactions to feedback on graded work and what they do with it

‘Now that’s the feedback I want!’ Students’ reactions to feedback on graded work and what they do with it

Teachers’ Perceptions and Practices of Written Feedback in Higher Education

Limitations of Corrective Feedforward: A Call for Resubmission Practices to become Learning-oriented

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