The document discusses key ideas for producing effective feedback, including integrating feedback into curriculum design, providing timely feedback within 3 weeks, and making feedback clear, focused, supportive, and inclusive of student diversity. It also addresses the importance of developing students' self-evaluation skills and engagement with feedback through dialogue in order to improve learning outcomes. The overall focus is on establishing a learning-oriented framework where feedback helps students to self-regulate and take agency over their learning.
1. Making Feedback Count
producing good useful feedback
What, Why, How?
Teaching Essentials: https://blogs.shu.ac.uk/teaching/
Course-focused Practice: https://blogs.shu.ac.uk/cfp
2. Feedback is a key opportunity for
motivating and guiding students
- Black and Wiliam 1998; Sadler 2010
Making Feedback Count: Key ideas
3. Making Feedback Count: Key ideas
Integrated
explicitly integrated into curriculum design
and an outcome of all formative and
summative assessments;
consistent in terms of the student's
experience of their course.
Sheffield Hallam University’s Feedback Protocols
Good feedback is
4. Making Feedback Count: Key ideas
Timely
just-in-time in response to formative
assessments;
normally given within three working weeks
on summative assessments
Sheffield Hallam University’s Feedback Protocols
Good feedback is
5. Making Feedback Count: Key ideas
Clear and Focused
refers to assessment criteria;
uses plain English so it is comprehensible
and useful;
indicates the level of achievement;
identifies goals for further development
with advice about how to improve.
Sheffield Hallam University’s Feedback Protocols
Good feedback is
6. Making Feedback Count: Key ideas
Sheffield Hallam University’s Feedback Protocols
Good feedback is
Supportive and Inclusive
appropriate to the assessment level;
appropriate for the needs of the student;
recognises student diversity;
celebrates personal achievements;
personally enabling and encouraging.
7. Making feedback effective
Making Feedback Count: Key ideas
Feedback relates to assessment criteria which
are derived from the course and module
learning outcomes.
It needs to be,
Manageable to produce
Coherent and in an appropriate format
relevant to the assessment activity
Useful - wanted, easy to access and usable,
and actionable so it is used by every student
High quality - clear, timely, personal, and
supportive
EAT
make feedback central to the course discourse
Provide accessible feedback
Provide early opportunities to act on
feedback
Prepare students for meaningful dialogue
Promote development of students’ self-
evaluation skills
Enhancing Assessment Feedback Practice in Higher
Education: The EAT Framework
Carol Evans (2016)
https://blogs.shu.ac.uk/eat/
Quality, not quantity
8. Learning-oriented assessment framework
– David Carless, 2015
Making Feedback Count: Key ideas
Productive Assessment
Task Design
Student Self-
Evaluative Capacities
Student Engagement
with Feedback
Authentic Assessment
Constructively aligned
Spreading student effort and promoting
sustained engagement
Mirroring real-life uses of the discipline
Integrated and coherent
Incorporates feedback dialogues
Supports students in understanding
quality
Flexibility and choice
Encourages deep approach to learning
Programme-based approaches –
cumulative, integrated and coherent
How can you make feedback work for you?
9. Ensuring students engage with feedback – DEFT: a student-student perspective
Making Feedback Count: Key ideas
Explain what feedback is
“any kind of information that someone gives you about your
performance, skills and understanding”
It can come from
• Your tutor, your peers, yourself through reflection, and
anyone who knows you well
Listen to your feedback, act on it, and improve
What issues is it highlighting?
What solutions does it propose?
Good grades? – don’t slip
Why did you do well?
How can you do even better?
Disappointing grade? Feeling bad?
It’s about your work, not you. Learn what you can do to improve.
Sample from:
HEA’s Developing
Engagement with
Feedback Toolkit
(DEFT)
10. Making Feedback Count: Key ideas
Feedback creates an opportunity to
develop student self-regulation and
a sense of agency over their learning
Beyond just providing
feedback
“get students to clarify their
understandings of feedback e.g. lack
of knowledge; lack of preparation;
misunderstanding of the process and
/or requirements”
“Students’ understanding of feedback and their
capacity to act on it depends on their beliefs,
motives, and established schema”
Feedback as a locus of learning
Feedback needs to have a dual function:
meeting students’ immediate assessment needs
developing the knowledge skills and dispositions they
require beyond the module/ programme as part of
lifelong learning
(see Boud, 2000; Hounsell, 2007).
Evans, C. (2016). Evans Assessment Tool (EAT). University of Southampton
We tend to see feedback in isolation, but it can be so much more
11. Making Feedback Count: Key ideas
Our students told the University’s CAFÉ project feedback should be…
Consistent in quality across their course…
…No contradictions or mixed messages in how
assessment and feedback are introduced and
delivered
Clear… with opportunities for further clarification
Generally, they want succinct feedback they can take
on board and use
Generally, they say they want feedforward more than
feedback
Feedforward needs to be actionable by them.
Is our feedback
practice of a
consistent
quality?
12. Review these questions – over to you
Do you agree what you mean by 'good quality feedback’?
Do you all share a sense of what students perceive 'good quality feedback' to
mean? Do you regularly discuss this and refresh your shared understanding?
How do I get the balance between feedback and feedforward right?
How do I know what will be useful to a student later?
How much feedback is enough?
How do we and can we produce feedback that is both manageable and of a high
quality?
How can we ensure the feedback we produce is wanted, easy to access and usable,
and used by every student?
Discussion
13. We’ve begun the conversation…
Personally
What do you take from the discussion and what more would you like to find out or
think about?
Collectively
How can your course team or subject group make use of these ideas
What further development would be useful for you?
Your Action Plan
Hinweis der Redaktion
Feedback is often identified as a problematic area of academic practice. There are a couple of reasons for this: it is an area singled out in the NSS and this means students, across the sector, may have a tendency to focus on memorable aspects of their experience, whether these are good or bad. Secondly, feedback is often understood as a reaction to an event that has been and gone: for the tutor and the student the world has moved on and the opportunity for making feedback count seems to have passed. So when it comes to thinking about feedback it is worth thinking about how feedback can be designed so that it is useful, helpful and memorable.
This quote from Black and Wiliam actually identifies the opportunity we are missing if we are not getting it right – we should think of feedback as a key learning opportunity.
Let’s begin by considering Sheffield Hallam’s four Feedback Protocols which are based on a wealth of evidence and literature…
Sheffield Hallam University’s Feedback Protocols: https://staff.shu.ac.uk/sls/qess/Documents/Good%20Practice%20Feedback%20briefing%20paper.pdf
The first protocol is about Integrated feedback.
Simply, this means feedback that is designed into the teaching and learning experience – it is not an after thought or an ‘add on’ – it has been designed to help the student learn based on what they have already done, either through formative activities or summative tasks.
The second point here, highlights the need for consistency across the course for high quality feedback. This necessitates, therefore, that course teams talk about what good quality feedback looks like, including what is reasonable. On some courses students will receive abundant, detailed feedback from some tutors and much more selective feedback from others. This can create tensions amongst teaching teams as there is no wrong or right about this – other than what actually is going to work best for the course team and the students as a whole. This requires discussion.
Sheffield Hallam University’s Feedback Protocols: https://staff.shu.ac.uk/sls/qess/Documents/Good%20Practice%20Feedback%20briefing%20paper.pdf
Timeliness is key. This is a sensitive matter because many academics read this as having to turn around copious amounts of feedback within three weeks of a summative assessment. Actually, that perception is usually wrong. Good feedback on summative assessment is often highly selective. But it is timely.
The detailed work of giving feedforward on formative activities through normal teaching ahead of summative assessments is probably where the spade work is really needed and potentially most impactful.
Feedback is best when it is ‘just-in-time’, but the question then is about when is the best time for feedback or feed forward?
There is much practical guidance and support available to help you think through effective strategies.
Sheffield Hallam University’s Feedback Protocols: https://staff.shu.ac.uk/sls/qess/Documents/Good%20Practice%20Feedback%20briefing%20paper.pdf
Good feedback is clear and focused.
It refers to the assessment criteria.
Good feedback must be easy to understand.
On summative assessment, it should be clear how well the student has done.
In terms of ‘making feedback count’, the final point is critical – the feedback needs to be useful. The student needs to know how they can improve. Now is the opportunity to be clear about what the student should pay attention to if they are to be more successful as they progress.
Sheffield Hallam University’s Feedback Protocols: https://staff.shu.ac.uk/sls/qess/Documents/Good%20Practice%20Feedback%20briefing%20paper.pdf
Sometimes the feedback message may feel like ‘tough love’ – you know if you don’t take the opportunity now to tell them something they should address, then the moment will have passed.
However, whatever the message, the tone must be highly supportive – many students know they have not done well and feel anxious about receiving feedback.
Your challenge then it to make sure that they want the feedback – they understand that it provides an opportunity to do better by building on the current experience.
You should not hide difficult messages, but your tone needs to be reassuring and focussed on how they can improve.
Sheffield Hallam University’s Feedback Protocols: https://staff.shu.ac.uk/sls/qess/Documents/Good%20Practice%20Feedback%20briefing%20paper.pdf
David Carless’s work concludes that the most useful and empowering feedback focuses on how the student learns and how they can develop by applying feedback through course-wide opportunities.
It’s important that the feedback works for you too, and your module. How can you maximise success on your module?
***Often this is by creating a dialogic culture – for example, using formative activities as an opportunity to clarify misconceptions.
Carless, D. (2015). Excellence in university assessment : Learning from award-winning practice. Abingdon: Routledge.
Rhetorical question: How can you make feedback work for you?
Students have also produced research on what makes good feedback.
It is consistent with other research and is obviously worth looking at. They have produced practical guidance.
But have you asked your own students what works? This is an obvious step you can take as a course team.
Good advice for students from students and staff can be found in the HEA’s Developing Engagement with Feedback Toolkit (DEFT)
AUTHORS
Dr Naomi E. Winstone - University of Surrey
Dr Robert A. Nash - Aston University
PUBLISH DATE
Tuesday, 6th September, 2016
How to Use Feedback Effectively
https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/developing-engagement-feedback-toolkit-deft
Research on feedback is full of good ideas.
Because this is such a hot issue for course success, a focus on feedback practice is likely to lead to far reaching improvement in all aspects of practice.
The University continues to work with course teams and their students and we continue to learn a lot about what works.
Again the messages are loud and clear. They want feedback…
Consistency
Clarity, and
‘Feed forward’ feedback they can use to improve their learning
*** As a course team, a key question must be “Is our feedback practice of a consistent quality?”