I attended the ASKe feedback event in Oxford last week ‘New perspectives on feedback’ http://www.brookes.ac.uk/aske/events/ Professor David Nicol gave an interesting talk about the importance of developing complex evaluative skills in learners and argued that even good quality feedback has to be evaluated by the individual against their understanding of their performance and standards. This is more similar to the concept of self-monitoring than a global self-assessment judgement about performance. The interACT project has aimed to better sequence assessment tasks in a programmatic way, profile tutor feedback in order to improve quality of feedback, ask students to process and reflect on the feedback and also to evaluate their work against the specific standards and criteria. Thereby, adhering to a number of strategies mentioned by David on the day. The limitation in our implementation at the moment remains the limited opportunities in reviewing and evaluating peers’ work. In reflecting about the questions we have chosen perhaps one of the questions should have asked the student to summarise the feedback – David reported that this is analogous to self explanation which Chi et al (1994) report to improve self-monitoring and evaluation. ( For more on self-explaining http://www.learnlab.org/research/wiki/index.php/Prompted_self-explanation_hypothesis) He also reported some work by Cho and MacArthur who showed that students made more complex improvements to their work after receiving feedback from multiple sources. http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/edu/103/1/73.html
On my reading list a paper on how to effect transformational change in HE by Nicol and Draper (2009) http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/~steve/rap/docs/NicolDraperTransf4.pdf
In the afternoon I attended a workshop by Stephen Merry on audio feedback. He narrates his feedback instantly as marking and uses both written and audio feedback. We had an interesting discussion about how audio feedback makes you more aware of the person at the receiving end of the feedback and so aware of the potential emotional impact of the feedback. Merry & Orsmond (2008) Students’ Attitudes to and Usage of Academic Feedback Provided Via Audio Files: http://www.bioscience.heacademy.ac.uk/journal/vol11/beej-11-3.aspx
References
Chi, M. T. H., DeLeeuw, N., Chiu, M.-H., & LaVancher, C. (1994). Eliciting self-explanations improves understanding. Cognitive Science, 18, 439-477
Cho, K., & MacArthur, C. (2011). Learning by reviewing. Journal of Educational Psychology, 103(1), 73-84. doi:10.1037/a0021950
Merry, S. & Orsmond, P. (2008) Students’ Attitudes to and Usage of Academic Feedback Provided via Audio Files. Bioscience Education e-journal 11-3.
Back at the ranch
Susie Schofield is trying to make the wiki more readily searchable and believes the solution may be in getting students to insert their names into the title of the wiki. We are planning to run some focus groups in the first instance in order to determine what other refinements to our model are needed.
The team is very excited about our upcoming dissemination events including at the ASME conference and also the HEA event we are hosting here in Dundee. Check previous blog post for more information!
