1st Edition
Reconceptualising Feedback in Higher Education Developing dialogue with students
Feedback is a crucial element of teaching, learning and assessment. There is, however, substantial evidence that staff and students are dissatisfied with it, and there is growing impetus for change.
Student Surveys have indicated that feedback is one of the most problematic aspects of the student experience, and so particularly in need of further scrutiny. Current practices waste both student learning potential and staff resources. Up until now the ways of addressing these problems has been through relatively minor interventions based on the established model of feedback providing information, but the change that is required is more fundamental and far reaching.
Reconceptualising Feedback in Higher Education, coming from a think-tank composed of specialist expertise in assessment feedback, is a direct and more fundamental response to the impetus for change. Its purpose is to challenge established beliefs and practices through critical evaluation of evidence and discussion of the renewal of current feedback practices. In promoting a new conceptualisation and a repositioning of assessment feedback within an enhanced and more coherent paradigm of student learning, this book:
• analyses the current issues in feedback practice and their implications for student learning.
• identifies the key characteristics of effective feedback practices
• explores the changes needed to feedback practice and how they can be brought about
• illustrates through examples how processes to promote and sustain effective feedback practices can be embedded in modern mass higher education.
Provoking academics to think afresh about the way they conceptualise and utilise feedback, this book will help those with responsibility for strategic development of assessment at an institutional level, educational developers, course management teams, researchers, tutors and student representatives.
CONTENTS
Notes on Contributors
Foreword (Marcia Mentkowski)
Overview (Stephen Merry)
SECTION 1: CURRENT THINKING
- Section Overview
- Surveys of ‘the Student Experience’ and the Politics of Feedback
- Feedback - What Students Want
- Feedback on Feedback: uncrossing wires across sectors
- Assessment Feedback: an ‘Agenda for Change’
- Opening up Feedback: teaching learners to see
- Building ‘standards’ frameworks’: the role of guidance and feedback in supporting the achievement of learners
- Section Overview
- Involving Students in the Scholarship of Assessment: student voices on the feedback ‘Agenda for Change’
- Feedback Unbound: from master to usher
- Feedback and Feedforward: student responses and their implications
- Sustainable Feedback and the Development of Student Self-evaluative Capacities
- Students’ Social Learning Practice as a Way of Learning from Tutor Feedback
- Integrating Feedback with Classroom Teaching: using exemplars to scaffold learning
- Section Overview
- An Assessment Compact: changing the way an institution thinks about assessment and feedback
- Fostering Institutional Change in Feedback Practice through Partnership
- Making Learning-Oriented Assessment the Experience of all our Students: supporting institutional change
- Achieving Transformational or Sustainable Educational Change
Maddalena Taras
A. The Student Voice
Mantz Yorke
Alex Bols and Kate Wicklow
B. The Wider Picture: challenges to preconceptions
Maddalena Taras
Margaret Price, Karen Handley, Berry O’Donovan, Chris Rust and Jill Millar
C. Principles and Practices
D. Royce Sadler
Sue Bloxham
SECTION 2: ENHANCING THE STUDENT ROLE IN THE FEEDBACK PROCESS
David Carless
A. Students
Kay Sambell
Jan McArthur and Mark Huxham
Mirabelle Walker
B. Tutors
David Carless
Paul Orsmond, Stephen Merry and Karen Handley
Graham Hendry
SECTION 3: FOSTERING INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE
Margaret Price
Chris Rust, Margaret Price, Karen Handley, Berry O’Donovan and Jill Millar
Graham Holden and Chris Glover
Mark Russell, Dominic Bygate and Helen Barefoot
Steve Draper and David Nicol
Conclusion and Reflections (Stephen Merry, Margaret Price, David Carless and Maddalena Taras)
Index
Biography
Stephen Merry is Senior Lecturer in Cell Biology in the Faculty of Computing, Engineering and Sciences at Staffordshire University.
Margaret Price is Professor in Learning and Assessment at Oxford Brookes University.
David Carless is Professor of Educational Assessment at the University of Hong Kong.
Maddalena Taras is Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Education and Society at the University of Sunderland.
"By emphasizing feedback as modelling classroom behaviour, practising reflective thinking and acknowledging the moral-ethical part of "humane teaching and assessment! (Merry et al. 2013, Foreword), the responsibility that it takes to provide feedback to learners and/or peers and the ability to judge quality (Sadler 2013), readers are given useful and specific guidelines for the teaching profession itself – outside the academia." – Szilvia Barta, University of Debrecen, The Hungarian Educational Research Journal.