Assessment feedback only on demand: Supporting the few not supplying the many

Abstract

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.

Supporting Learners' Agentic Engagement With Feedback: A Systematic Review and a Taxonomy of Recipience Processes

“…This diverse category included interventions such as keeping a reflective feedback diary (Gleaves, Walker, & Grey, 2008), incorporating space into feedback pro formas for learners to add reflection (Quinton & Smallbone, 2010), and providing feedback only to learners who request it (Jones & Gorra, 2013). Note that some of these would fit within one of our four post hoc clusters previously described, but none fit any specific category of intervention components.…”

Engaging Students with Audio Feedback

“…It is only the relationships between the student and the instructor which can enhance learning. Slowly, a more thoughtful evaluation of the true complexity of the feedback process is emerging (Bastiaens & Stijnen 2012, Gleaves & Walker 2012, Thurlings et al 2013). …”

“One question per day” a mobile learning project

“…The authors' assumption is that such continuous engagement might have positive effects on the learning process, because it would lower the effects of lack of motivation and feeling lost, which are very often present in an eLearning environment. Furthermore, a lot of researches proved that engaged students are successful students [5][6] [7][8][9[. They earn better grades, have lower rates of attrition, and help their peers learn more.…”