The Developing Engagement with Feedback Toolkit (DEFT)

Feedback is one of the most powerful influences on students’ learning. There is a strong evidence base on effective delivery of feedback: what it should contain and how it should be framed. However we know far less about students’ reception of feedback information. If we want students to engage with and utilise the feedback we provide then what skills do they need and how do we nurture these skills? In this resource we first outline some of the key contemporary issues facing Higher Education practitioners in the domains of assessment and feedback and we consider the role and responsibility of the student in the feedback process. We then present a case study which outlines the development and implementation of the Developing Engagement with Feedback Toolkit (DEFT). Finally we present each component of the toolkit in turn: a feedback guide a feedback portfolio and a feedback workshop

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'It’d be useful, but I wouldn’t use it':barriers to university students’ feedback seeking and recipience

For feedback to be effective, it must be used by the receiver. Prior research has outlined numerous reasons why students’ use of feedback is sometimes limited, but there has been little systematic exploration of these barriers. In 11 activity-oriented focus groups, 31 undergraduate Psychology students discussed how they use assessment feedback. The data revealed many barriers that inhibit use of feedback, ranging from students’ difficulties with decoding terminology, to their unwillingness to expend effort. Thematic analysis identified four underlying psychological processes: awareness, cognisance, agency, and volition. We argue that these processes should be considered when designing interventions to encourage students’ engagement with feedback. Whereas the barriers identified could all in principle be removed, we propose that doing so would typically require – or would at least benefit from – a sharing of responsibility between teacher and student. The data highlight the importance of training students to be proactive receivers of feedback

Building Feedback Literacy:Students’ Perceptions of the Developing Engagement With Feedback Toolkit

Developing the requisite skills for engaging proactively with feedback is crucial for academic success. This paper reports data concerning the perceived usefulness of the Developing Engagement with Feedback Toolkit (DEFT) in supporting the development of students' feedback literacy skills. In Study 1, student participants were surveyed about their use of feedback, and their perceptions of the utility of the DEFT resources. In Study 2, students discussed the resources in focus groups. Study 3 compared students' responses on a measure of feedback literacy before and after they completed a DEFT feedback workshop. Participants perceived the DEFT favorably, and the data indicate that such resources may enhance students' general feedback literacy. However, the data raise questions about when such an intervention would be of greatest value to students, the extent to which students would or should engage voluntarily, and whether it would engage those students with the greatest need for developmental support

The need to disentangle assessment and feedback in higher education

In contemporary higher education systems, the processes of assessment and feedback are often seen as coexisting activities. As a result, they have become entangled in both policy and practice, resulting in a conceptual and practical blurring of their unique purposes. In this paper, we present a critical examination of the issues created by the entanglement of assessment and feedback, arguing that it is important to ensure that the legitimate purposes of both feedback and assessment are not compromised by inappropriate conflation of the two. We situate our argument in the shifting conceptual landscape of feedback, where there is increasing emphasis on students being active players in feedback processes working with and applying information from others to future learning tasks, rather than regarding feedback as a mechanism of transmission of information by teachers. We surface and critically discuss six problems created by the entanglement of assessment and feedback: students’ focus on grades; comments justifying grades rather than support learning; feedback too late to be useful; feedback subordinated to all other processes in course design; overemphasis on documentation of feedback; and the downgrading of feedback created by requirements for anonymous marking. We then propose a series of strategies for preserving the learning function of feedback, through models that give primacy to feedback within learning cycles. We conclude by offering suggestions for research and practice that seek to engage with the challenges created by the entanglement of assessment and feedback, and that maintain the unique purposes of assessment and feedback

A memory advantage for past-oriented over future-oriented performance feedback

People frequently receive performance feedback that describes how well they achieved in the past, and how they could improve in future. In educational contexts, future-oriented (directive) feedback is often argued to be more valuable to learners than past-oriented (evaluative) feedback; critically, prior research led us to predict that it should also be better remembered. We tested this prediction in six experiments. Subjects read written feedback containing evaluative and directive comments, which supposedly related to essays they had previously written (Experiments 1-2), or to essays another person had written (Experiments 3-6). Subjects then tried to reproduce the feedback from memory after a short delay. In all six experiments, the data strongly revealed the opposite effect to the one we predicted: despite only small differences in wording, evaluative feedback was in fact recalled consistently better than directive feedback. Furthermore, even when adult subjects did recall directive feedback, they frequently misremembered it in an evaluative style. These findings appear at odds with the position that being oriented toward the future is advantageous to memory. They also raise important questions about the possible behavioral effects and generalizability of such biases, in terms of students’ academic performance

Toward a cohesive psychological science of effective feedback

Empirical research on effective assessment feedback often falls short in demonstrating not just what works, but how and why. In this introduction to the special issue, ‘Psychological Perspectives on the Effects and Effectiveness of Assessment Feedback,’ we first synthesize the recommendations from review papers on the topic of feedback published since 2010. In multiple respects this synthesis points to a clear wish among feedback researchers: for feedback research to become more scientific. Here we endorse that view, and propose a framework of research questions that a psychological science of feedback might seek to answer. Yet we—and the authors of the diverse papers in this special issue—also illustrate a wealth of scientific research and methods, and rigorous psychological theory, that already exist to inform understanding of effective feedback. One barrier to scientific progress is that this research and theory is heavily fragmented across disciplinary ‘silos’. The papers in this special issue, which represent disparate traditions of psychological research, provide complementary insights into the problems that rigorous feedback research must surmount. We argue that a cohesive psychological science of feedback requires better dialogue between the diverse subfields, and greater use of psychological methods, measures, and theories for informing evidence-based practice

“Check the grade, log out”:students’ engagement with feedback in learning management systems

There is growing recognition that socio-constructivist representations of feedback processes, where students build their own understanding through engaging with and discussing feedback information, are more appropriate than cognitivist transmission-oriented models. In parallel, practice has developed away from hard-copy handwritten or typed feedback comments, towards the provision of e-feedback in Learning Management Systems (LMS). Through thematic analysis of activity-oriented focus groups with 33 Undergraduate students, the present study aimed to explore 1) students’ experience of engaging with feedback in the LMS; 2) barriers to students’ engagement; and 3) students’ perceptions of the potential for technology to ameliorate these barriers. The data reveal particular barriers to engagement created by the LMS environment; grades and feedback are commonly separated spatially, limiting attention to the latter. Additionally, the distributed location of feedback from different tasks limits synthesis of feedback. Nevertheless, students perceived that the LMS environment affords opportunities for addressing such challenges, particularly in relation to the potential for a LMS tool to synthesise feedback information across modules, and to direct students to resources to develop their skills. The findings are discussed in the context of cycles of engagement with feedback, and implications for the principled use of technology in feedback processes are discussed

Evaluation of a large-scale inclusive assessment intervention: a novel approach to quantifying perceptions about assessment literacy

Assessment literacy involves students having a clear understanding of standards and criteria, which allows for the development of self-regulation. We introduced a standardised assessment brief template, built on principles from the inclusive assessment EAT Framework, to enhance students’ assessment literacy. In order to evaluate this approach, students responded to open-ended questions about whether they felt this approach supported their development of assessment literacy. As a means of understanding the beliefs and thinking patterns in students’ responses, text analysis software, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), was used to identify the presence of words in responses from particular linguistic domains. Significant differences in students’ self-regulation were found based on their choice of words; students who expressed more negative language had significantly lower self-regulation. The findings indicate that the design of our assessment brief template has the potential for developing aspects of perceived assessment literacy that are linked to self-regulation