‘Feed‐forward’: improving students' use of tutors' comments

A small‐scale action research project was carried out on students' feedback histories on one undergraduate module. Old grades and comment sheets were collected and analysed by staff for recurring advice to individual students on the target module. This advice was then synthesized to create simple individual learning plans for the students' forthcoming assignments, in other words old feedback was applied to a new task. A number of additional teaching and learning interventions were provided for participants and the statistical outcomes showed a small gain in the grades achieved against those who did not participate. Interviews were held with participants that indicated a number of reasons why feedback was not optimized to assist further learning.

[1]  David Kember,et al.  To Control or Not to Control: The question of whether experimental designs are appropriate for evaluating teaching innovations in higher education , 2003 .

[2]  Alan Skelton,et al.  Getting the Message Across: The problem of communicating assessment feedback , 2001 .

[3]  L. Elton.  Staff and Educational Development Association Conference , 1997 .

[4]  D. Sadler.  Evaluation and the Improvement of Academic Learning , 1983 .

[5]  John Martin Leonard.  Statistics: The arithmetic of decision-making , 1971 .

[6]  M. Randall,et al.  How Well Am I Doing? Using a Corpus-based Analysis to Investigate Tutor and Institutional Messages in Comment Sheets , 2003 .

[7]  Chris Rust,et al.  Improving Students' Learning by Developing their Understanding of Assessment Criteria and Processes , 2003 .

[8]  Rachel Johnson,et al.  The Authority of the Student Evaluation Questionnaire , 2000 .

[9]  Susan M. Brookhart,et al.  Successful Students' Formative and Summative Uses of Assessment Information , 2001 .

[10]  M. Taras,et al.  To Feedback or Not to Feedback in Student Self-assessment , 2003 .

[11]  Christopher Winter,et al.  An investigation into the reasons why students do not collect marked assignments and the accompanying feedback , 2004 .

[12]  R. Higgins,et al.  The Conscientious Consumer: Reconsidering the role of assessment feedback in student learning , 2002 .

[13]  Brian Street,et al.  Student writing and staff feedback in higher education: an academic literacies approach , 2000 .

[14]  Frank Webster,et al.  Assessing the Undergraduate Dissertation , 2000 .

[15]  Kate Chanock,et al.  Comments on Essays: Do students understand what tutors write? , 2000 .

[16]  P. Orsmond,et al.  The Use of Student Derived Marking Criteria in Peer and Self-assessment , 2000 .

[17]  P. Orsmond,et al.  Biology students’ utilization of tutors’ formative feedback: a qualitative interview study , 2005 .