Feedback is the issue that students complain most about at a University. From my limited observation and experience, the students only get worried about their grades – either for individual assignments or final grades – if they haven’t received what they consider to be adequate and appropriate feedback during their studies. So what does this look like and will students ever be satisfied?
As a relative new academic, I started in August 2009, in my first semester of teaching I delivered as best as I could using Stephen Brookfield’s autobiographic lens approach (even though I didn’t know about Brookfield at the time!). I provided feedback as I had experienced as a student. Sadly with academia, often a new academic is given the keys to the office and that’s all the induction and training that’s offered. It’s a sink or swim approach – and as someone who swims between 1-2 kilometres a day, I was determined I would not sink! Not possible!
In this first semester of teaching, I offered feedback as best I could within an incredibly heavy teaching load, developing and teaching a unit that hadn’t been taught before and course convening (program coordinator) for the first time. By the end of the semester, reviewing the student feedback on my own performance, I realised I had a lot to learn. While I thought I had been giving students ongoing feedback – via emails, conversations, in-class discussions, etc, I realised that I hadn’t explained to students that this was feedback. They were so used to receiving written comments on an Assignment Coversheet believing this was the only type of feedback there was. While I was providing this approach to students, I realised I had to change my ways if I wanted to ‘educate’ them about other styles of feedback. This is something I have now been exploring since this time.
In an effort to educate students about the different approaches to feedback, I now include in the Unit Outline (Course or Subject Outline) the following:
Feedback can be given to students through a variety of ways, including individual, group, whole of class, self or peer feedback. This can be through written comments, student consultation, private discussions, email, phone conversation, before and after classes, through class discussion, by formal peer feedback, peer discussion, postings on Moodle, etc. For this assignment, feedback will be offered through these approaches and not through the traditional assignment feedback sheet (hand written comments). As assignments within this unit are formative, which means they build upon learning skills from one activity and assessment to the next, tutors may privately provide feedback to individual students to assist with ongoing skills development.
‘Feedback’ is an ongoing discussion within classes – and I now label Feedback as ‘Feedback’ on all appropriate communications – emails, Moodle posts, in class discussions, when students offer peer feedback in class, etc. I Call it, I name it, I label it as much as possible. It would be an interesting exercise to count the number of times I now use the word ‘feedback’ and then compare it to that first semester of teaching in 2009! There would be a dramatic increase.
As well, for individual and group assignments, I now provide detailed feedback via Moodle – it’s all electronic. This has proved to be a great time saver and enables me (and my tutors) to offer more detailed, lengthy feedback than the traditional approach of handwritten comments on the assignment sheets. All of us can type reasonably fast, so this is a much quicker approach than the laborious hand written comments – and it also means students can read my comments! (I often can’t read my own writing!).
It’s critical to find time saving approaches as the University (University of Canberra) has a policy that feedback on assessment tasks must be provided within 10 working days (essentially two weeks) of their submission. However, marking about 100 assignments makes this is almost impossible if I want to provide valuable feedback that will assist the student in their development. This is one of the many challenges for the academic: delivering against university operational requirements that have been introduced with the belief that it assists the students, but in reality it could be counter to what is trying to be achieved. I refuse to send back assignments with comments like ‘good work’ or ‘needs improving’. I try to offer feedback as I would want to receive it – which means that I need to consider the students work. I thought I did well getting feedback to all assignments back within three weeks. If I had continued to use the old approach of writing the feedback on the assignment cover sheet the students would not have received the feedback within this time period as I would have handed them back at the next class, wasting valuable time. However, due to Moodle and posting the feedback online, students receive the feedback and their grades as soon as it is posted; making it far more efficient for them and for me. This doesn’t mean I won’t consider continuous improvement. Something I now realise is a key role for any academic is to consider ways to save time: how to be effective, yet find efficiencies!!
Considering the reflections I have undertaken on the most effective ways to deliver feedback, it was disappointing to receive the feedback in my own studies for the Education Technology subject I have been undertaking for my Graduate Certificate in Tertiary Education. The reason I decided to undertake the GCTE was to learn, develop, improve and have the ability to effectively reflect on my teaching and learning. I want to be pushed and challenged.
The feedback on my Wiki Assignments as posted here on this blog, was as a Rubrics (refer Rubrics Feedback above) – but not what I considered to be an effective rubrics that would assist me to value add and reflect on my skills and abilities – and assist with my teaching. Sadly, it was the most amount of feedback I had received in this subject to date.
However, there have been lots of positives from receiving this limited, somewhat vacant feedback. As a result of my own disappointment and concern that this is a standard offered to academics eager to learn about best practice teaching and learning approaches, I have further reflected on feedback approaches and considered how best to offer and shape it for students. As a result, it was a key discussion that my sessional tutors and I had in our regular end of semester working dinner catch up. We have decided that a suitable feedback approach would be to use a rubrics as well as incorporating detailed, individual, personalised feedback in the comment section – not just three sentences that could be applicable to anyone. We will continue to post this electronically as we all agreed this was a great time saver and gets to the students quickly. We feel that by introducing a rubrics – and including this in the Unit Outline (subject guide), this will assist students further to understand what they will be achieving against. While I have always included detailed Marking Criteria and Expectations of Grade Standards, we believe that with a rubrics it can add another dimension that will further support the student. Our goal is to provide more detailed feedback, and more quickly. Fingers crossed we will achieve this!
Reference:
Brookefield, S. (1995) Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
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