Providing feedback

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Many academics find marking assignments and examinations to be unsatisfying, repetitive and time consuming. And students often complain about lack of helpful feedback. However offering and receiving constructive feedback on prescribed learning tasks is vital to the experience of teaching and learning. Students need adequate feedback that will be useful for them when they are preparing their next assignment. Students are often disappointed to receive an assignment back with a mark and a bland meaningless comment or no feedback at all.

Establishing a dialogue with students about their performance is important for both on-campus and off-campus students. Off-campus students often need extra assistance in benchmarking their learning because they are less able to do this for themselves through in-class mixing and discussion. In an on-campus context, returning assignments, reviewing results and discussing common misunderstandings are possible in the normal flow of program delivery. In an off-campus context, providing feedback may require more reliance upon written reports, telephone calls, or recorded audio or video systems. In either context, an effective dialogue with students about their performance is critical.

The following strategies offer a variety of ways to achieve timely and effective feedback to students on their completed assessment tasks:

• Provide constructive feedback that tells the student how they performed against the criteria, and how to improve in their next assessment task.
• Comment on the positive as well as the negative aspects of the assignment. Student work may score highly on some criteria, and poorly on others. A completed assignment may, for example, present a highly innovative perspective on the topic addressed, and yet contain factual inaccuracies and be poorly presented. The feedback provided should draw attention to both features, even though the grade given may be a compromise, indicating the assessor’s global consideration about the relative importance of the strengths and weaknesses evident in the assignment.
• Use language carefully because students can be sensitive about their work and easily demotivated.
• Use marking keys (with the standards and assessment criteria) that you can complete and attach when returning assignments.
• Design a statement bank (maybe as an electronic file) with common comments to which individual students can be referred.
• Mark selectively: for example there is little point going through an essay to mark every spelling or grammatical error. Mark a page or two and then ask the student to check the rest for spelling and grammar.
• Give group feedback. It may at times be appropriate to provide a general feedback sheet to all students. This sheet can include points about common misunderstandings, areas particularly well handled by most students and some discussion of the next assessment task. A summary of the range of grades obtained might also be useful as a means of helping students to locate their performance relative to that of others, thereby assisting them to focus their study load according to personal priorities.
• Provide model answers. Model answers or worked solutions to problems can sometimes be provided for students as part of their feedback. Once a model answer or worked solution has been developed, it can be incorporated in the feedback given to each student, thereby reducing the need to reinvent detailed feedback for each student in the class.
• Provide self-assessment quizzes. Self-assessment quizzes, or reflective exercises where students can check on their own knowledge development and diagnose their own learning needs, are helpful as a basis for formative feedback. These quizzes often assist in encouraging the students who are having the greatest degree of difficulty to identify themselves early.
• Use communication technologies. In traditional off-campus courses, use is frequently made of telephone, audiotaped and even videotaped feedback mechanisms. These mechanisms may be more time-saving for staff and helpful for students than lengthy written feedback. With the increased use of computer-mediated communications in teaching and learning, much use can be made of email and discussion lists for the purpose of providing timely and comprehensive feedback to students, whether on campus or off campus. In addition to the obvious benefit of the rapid speed of turnaround, the integrated nature of the computer-mediated environment also allows for archives of teachers’ comments to be maintained, the re-use of teaching resources for feedback purposes, and discussion among students regarding assessment criteria and the insights they have obtained from the feedback received.

Rowntree (1990:328) makes the following additional suggestions on providing feedback to students:

• Draw the learners’ attention to facts they have overlooked or misinterpreted.
• Suggest alternative approaches or interpretations.
• Suggest new sources (e.g. other people) from whom learners might get feedback.
• Draw attention to gaps in the learners’ reasoning.
• Suggest how learners might present their ideas more effectively.
• Offer comments that will help learners sharpen their practical skills.
• Ask for further explanation of muddled answers.
• Demonstrate useful short-cuts in procedure.
• Help learners reflect on how a piece of work might have been improved.
• Point out relationships between the learners’ present work and their earlier work.
• Commend the learners for any unexpected insights, special efforts or improvement in competence.

Ask yourself

• How can I improve the quality and timeliness of my feedback to students?
• How can I offer my external students more feedback?
• What time-saving strategies can I employ to offer my students more feedback?

The administration of assessment

Most Schools will have documents and processes that cover the administration of assessment. Make sure that you are familiar with the following:

• policy on deadlines and extensions
• maximum word limit requirements
• how assignments are received
• acknowledgement of receipt
• quality requirements e.g. word-processed only
• policies on plagiarism
• turnaround time for marks and feedback
• tracking
• quality of feedback.

Ask yourself

• Am I familiar with my School’s policies and procedures regarding the administration of assessment?

Assessing learning – at a glance

From this section about assessing learning make sure you have:

• read the SCU Academic Board’s Principles of student assessment and the University’s Rules relating to awards
• understood the University’s standards-based framework for student assessment and developed performance criteria for all assessment tasks and grading standards for units or programs
• checked the alignment of the assessment tasks with the unit objectives, content, and teaching and learning activities
• checked that instructions for assessment tasks are communicated as clearly and fully as possible
• selected a variety of assessment methods that are appropriate to the skills you want your students to develop
• taken all possible measures to maximise the reliability of your marking and grading
• decided on a number of strategies for giving feedback to students
• become familiar with the assessment-related administrative processes and documents your School has developed.

Resources

There are some excellent practical resources that discuss the facilitation of particular assessment methods in some detail with well-documented case studies. Some suggestions include:

Angelo, T. & Cross, K. (1993). Classroom assessment techniques. San Fransisco:Jossey-Bass.

Gibbs, G. (1995). Assessing student centred courses. UK: Oxford Centre for Staff Development, Oxford Brookes University.

Gibbs, G., Habeshaw, S. & Habeshaw, T. (1988). 53 interesting ways to assess your students. Bristol: Technical and Educational Services.

Gibbs, G. & Habeshaw, T. (1989). Preparing to teach. Bristol: Technical and Educational Services.

Gronlund, N. & Linn, R. (1990). Measurement and evaluation in teaching, 6th edn. USA: Macmillan.

Miller, C. & Parlett, M. (1974). Up to the mark: A study of the examination game. Guildford: Society for Research in Higher Education.

Morgan, C. & O’Reilly, M. (1999). Assessing open and distance learners. London: Kogan Page.

Nightingale, P. et al. (1996). Assessing learning in universities. Sydney: University of NSW – Professional Development Centre.

Ramsden, P. (1992). Learning to teach in higher education. New York: Routledge.

References

Biggs, J.B. (1992). Teaching for learning. Melbourne: ACER.

Brown, S., Rust, C. & Gibbs, G. (1994). Strategies for diversifying assessment in higher education. UK: Oxford Centre for Staff Development, Oxford Brookes University.

Miller, C. & Parlett, M. (1974). Up to the mark: A study of the examination game. Guildford: Society for Research in Higher Education.

Morgan, C. & O’Reilly, M. (1999). Assessing open and distance learners. London: Kogan Page.

Nightingale, P. et al. (1996). Assessing learning in universities. Sydney: University of NSW – Professional Development Centre.

Rowntree, D. (1990). Teaching through self-instruction. London: Kogan Page.

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