Feeding Back to Students
Feedback to students is an issue of quality assurance and quality enhancement:
'Institutions should ensure that appropriate feedback is provided to students on assessed working in a way that promotes learning and facilitates improvement' (QAA Code of Practice for the assurance of academic quality in higher education, section 6 May 2000)
The importance of feedback for student learning cannot be overstated (Gipps, 2003). Improving formative feedback has been shown to raise standards in assessment, a conclusion based on a review of over 250 papers from several countries by Black and Wiliam (1998). They have also shown that the giving of marks has a negative effect, as students ignore feedback comments when marks or grades are given. Clarke et al., (2004) have shown that formative assessment can reinforce the content of lectures and can 'act to cement students' understanding of key concepts and ideas' (Clarke et al., 2004: 259)
There is a lot of advice given about feedback, that it should be timely to be effective, that it should provide constructive information to help with learning, that it should be related to assessment criteria that are clearly understood by the students, and that it should make explicit to students what is required for high-quality work (Black et al 2002; Cowan, 2003; Sadler 1998).
Comments on student work are only useful as feedback if students can use them to help them improve in similar further work, and Black et al (2002: 10) say that: 'to be effective, feedback should cause thinking to take place'.
Feedback should be provided in a timely manner, the longer the gap between the assessment performance and the feedback on that assessment, the more that students are likely to treat the feedback as summative, as they have already moved on to new knowledge and new learning experiences.
The information provided to the student must be of use to them: 'feedback functioned formatively only if the information fed back to the learner was used by the learner in improving performance' (Black et al 2002: 14). Feedback should focus on what needs to be done, providing a motivation that improvement is possible, rather than focussing on ability, which can cause damage to self-esteem of low attainers.
For students to be able to make use of the feedback, they have to be able to understand and apply the assessment criteria to their work. Once they can do this, they should be able to start making assessments of their own performance and begin to manage their own learning. Sadler (1989) argued that assessment criteria do not in themselves help in judging performance, but that students have to be helped to interpret the criteria for any piece of assessed work. Involving students in peer assessment, where they actively engage in using the criteria is one way of helping students to understand them, and then apply them in their own work.
Analysis of the feedback that staff give to their students can reveal more about the nature of the assessment task. Black et al., (2002: 9) describe this, when talking about work with teachers in schools: 'They found that some tasks were useful in revealing pupils' understandings and misunderstandings, but that others focussed mainly on conveying information'. From this analysis, the teachers decided to modify some of the activities, remove some and find others which assessed the outcomes that were intended for their pupils. In the same way staff in higher and further education can analyse their feedback comments to evaluate the assessment tasks that they construct for their students. In addition, they can use an analysis of their feedback comments to provide information about the teaching that has been happening, and the evaluation may show areas of misunderstandings across the student body that require further attention in teaching situations. An example from Liverpool John Moores University is provided in the section overview of e-assessment.
The SENLEF project (Student Enhanced Learning through Effective Feedback) has produced a very useful publication, 'Enhancing student learning though effective formative feedback' outlining why feedback is important and how staff and students can use feedback. The associated case studies provide many ideas that staff can use in improving the formative feedback to their students.
e-Assessment gives staff the capacity to provide feedback to students on their learning in a timely manner. By associating feedback with objective test questions students can readily appreciate where they have misunderstandings, and anecdotal evidence suggests that, when allowed to sit a test multiple times, they will check each of the incorrect answers to find out why they are incorrect and so enhance their learning even further.
