0. Overview | 1. Student Profiles | 2. Discipline Contexts | 3. Media Choices | 4. Intended Learning Outcomes | 5. Assessment | 6. Learning Teaching Activities | 7. Feedback | 8. Evaluation
The fourth element in a constructively aligned course design approach, and the seventh stage in the 8-SLDF, is feedback throughout. Closely reflective of both our assessment practice and our learning activities, feedback is best fully integrated into the learning rather than seen as a separate administrative response to submitted work. Designing feedback opportunities throughout our courses will lead us to adopt variations in our learning activities and potentially modify our assessment strategies as well. Reviewing our strategies for feedback at this stage in the design process helps us ensure we can adjust our ILOs, assessments, and activities if necessary to accommodate meaningful feedback throughout.
Note that I make a distinction between
I suggest you use the words differently and reinforce that you are offering feedback and inviting evaluative comments. In the UK, we have a National Student Survey, which rather unhelpfully asks students for ‘feedback’ on their learning experiences. It makes it harder to orient students to think about feedback in the specific way we would like them to. I students equate ‘feedback’ with questionnaires and written annotations on scripts alone, they miss the voluminous feedback that is offered in any effective teaching and learning context. |
There are four concepts which we need to clarify or define for this stage of the 8-SLDF. These are:
- Formative Feedback
- Feedback for Learning
- Feedforward
- Feedback Throughout.
They all feature in a well-structured feedback approach to any course or programme in higher education, whether classroom/seminar-based, online, or blended.
Formative Feedback
As a working definition, we are going to define feedback as communication received by a student as supportive and directive commentary on their work when it is shared with others.
You’ll note that this definition does not exclude having peers’ feedback on each other’s work (peer feedback), but it does encompass both a student’s work-in-progress and that submitted for credit-bearing assessment. These are sometimes defined as formative feedback for in-progress work and summative feedback for final assessments. This is not strictly accurate or helpful because all feedback should be ‘formative’.
The definition of formative is “serving to form something, especially having a profound influence on a person’s development.” One should be doing that equally when marking a final assessment as well as throughout the course.
Feedback for learning
Anyone who has ever played a sport or learnt to play a musical instrument knows that having a teacher or coach tell you did well or what you didn’t do right can be helpful. But normally, only when it is associated with guidance that tells you what you need to do better next time.
This is why we prefer not to talk about feedback on learning, which is inevitably retrospective, and instead focus on feedback for learning. It can be challenging sometimes to find something positive about a poor assignment when it is so easy to document its flaws, or indeed, if it is very good, you may struggle to identify what could be improved.
Feedback for learning is still part of the learning process and is integral to the role of the tutor, teacher or lecturer.
Feedforward
It is widely accepted that feedback should be positive and focus on what the student can and should do better next time. Sometimes that is hard because you don’t always know what the past or future module structures are for that student’s individual learning journey. You may be forced to generalise your commentary.
Feedforward only works best when there is a Programme structure with central oversight and decisive management. How often do you hear colleagues complaining that students are unprepared from earlier courses? That is not the students’ fault. It is our responsibility to ensure that our course and programme designs are aligned. We should be able to identify the incremental learning gains across modules within a programme and feedforward accordingly.
Feedback throughout
Feedback is part of the learning process. It is another way of describing a response in a conversation. Someone makes a statement, you respond, and in doing so, you provide feedback. You confirm ascent, disagreement or seek clarification. You might correct them, expand on their idea, or suggest alternatives. Clearly, feedback is a normal form of human communication. It is not an administrative duty, only to engage in when faced with a pile of scripts or an email folder bulging with submissions.
| You can enforce students’ awareness of the feedback they are engaged in by using verbal signifiers. In response to a variety of different contexts, you might say: “Let me just provide feedback on that observation, because I think it has some merits there….” “Well, I’m not sure that there is a consensus on that point, but let me give feedback on what I believe you are all suggesting here, and you can tell me whether I’m right….” You can address such comments to individuals or the entire cohort, face-to-face or online; the important point is that you reinforce the notion that you are feeding back for their learning, not on their learning. Let’s be blunt, students don’t think we give them enough feedback, we need to take every opportunity to label our feedback as FEEDBACK! |
Guidance on Feedback Throughout
Building on work by Nicols (Nicol & Macfarlane-Dick, 2006), here is a TACTICS framework you can use to evaluate how your courses are designed to enable effective student feedback. Look at the ‘TIPS column
TACTICS: Framework for Feedback
| DESCRIPTOR | TIPS | |
| T | Timely: Feedback should be returned as soon as possible after an assessment or assignment and should be forward-looking. | Consider providing a group, or cohort, verbal (or audio recorded) feedback on first review while you write-up your individual feedback. |
| A | Amount: Feedback should focus on a limited number of points of evidence – balancing strengths as well as weaknesses. | Using a pre-prepared rubric based on the ILOs will focus your feedback towards specific skills and attributes. Be brief and focused wherever possible. |
| C | Clear: Feedback should be about the task, processing of the task, and self-regulation. The student should be clear about future steps for self-improvement. | Try and limit your feedback to the skills being assessed. Don’t wander too far into general academic practice commentary unless that is explicitly being assessed. |
| T | Tone: Feedback should be supportive, stimulating and motivating. Effective feedback promotes autonomy (self-management, meta-cognition). | Use a genuine voice, whilst remaining professional and respectful. Talk to fellow novice professionals. Read your feedback out loud to yourself. Is the tone right? |
| I | Informs Teaching: Feedback issues should be documented and shared to inform faculty learning and teaching practices | Don’t litigate a flawed assessment process with students (keep that for the module team). Providing Feedback is a form of module diagnostics. |
| C | Constructive: Feedback should identify how learning outcomes and assessment criteria are met or not met and suggest future actions for improvement. | UG and PG feedback may differ subtly. PG feedback can often be more reflective and encourages the student to self-analyse. UG feedback needs to be precise and focused on discrete actions the students should do in future. |
| S | Specific: Feedback should directly address the student’s evidence in the context of both learning outcomes and assessment criteria. | The closer your feedback is to the ILOs, the more meaningful it becomes to provide focused feedback. Is a student’s work ahead or behind in evidencing their ability to meet an ILO? Say so! |
Now that we have covered the basics, we can explore ways to make feedback work in your courses. These are intended as reflective notes. You need to think about the design you have generated to date, in line with the 8-SLDF, and the context in which it will be delivered.
Making Feedback Work
In this section, I want to outline four facets of feedback to consider. These four C’s are:
- Feedback as Communication
- Feedback as a Continuous Process
- Feedback as a Collaborative Effort
- Feedback as Current
Communication
One of the most difficult messages to grasp is that feedback is not your sole responsibility as the tutor. It is a joint responsibility between the student, the cohort, and the tutor. A collective responsibility, in fact. It is one of the identifiable benefits of social learning contexts. We spend a lot of time enabling students to learn with each other, and feedback is part of that contract. We need to be good at communicating that fact to students up front.
There are 4 key factors in feedback throughout the learning experience that ensure it works. These are:
- Ensure students know WHERE feedback can come from (not just you!)
- Ensure students are clear on the TIMELINES for (deferred) feedback
- Ensure students know what YOU MEAN by ‘feedback’
- Ensure students know what THEY SHOULD DO with feedback
In an increasingly consumerist atmosphere in higher education, students associate feedback with the service they are paying for. They are paying for your consultancy time in the same way they pay for a plumber or a dentist. Consequently, the ability of faculty to suspend feedback to prompt student action, or to provide deliberately partial support to elicit further effort, is available in higher education today only if it is clearly explained to students as part of their learning journey.
That does not mean that we can abdicate our responsibility for learning and teaching by limiting ourselves to the procedural process that requires “between 80-100 words of feedback, with at least two bullet points being positive and one of ‘areas for improvement”.
Instead, it is our responsibility to fully integrate feedback into the learning journey and make it a feature, rather than a prize. Let’s be realistic. The answer to the question of where feedback can and should come from depends on the students’ approach to their own learning (their personal epistemology). Students, notably those from educational cultures where learning has been rote or driven by knowledge accumulation, rather than by skills development, are often very demanding. Even mature students who themselves learnt in a norm-criterion based assessment model (see Stage 5) are more prone to ask, ‘how well am I doing?’ rather than ‘what can I do to improve?’.
We should have an explicit feedback policy and practice statement for our intended learning and make it explicit to students at the beginning and throughout the course.
Continuous Process
One of the issues tutors often face is that students do not take the opportunities for feedback seriously or appear to fail to act on it. Tutors should take every opportunity to talk about feedback FOR student learning, as being a continuous process. Describing feedback as an element of their learning increases their awareness of it and its value. Any opportunity to support a student in grounding their learning, to say ‘I get that’, and to prepare them to move ahead with further learning is a feedback moment.
Above is a ‘pyramid of feedback engagement’ for in-class learning contexts (real or virtual), from (at the bottom) a passive, almost subliminal, self-feedback question posted clearly as students assemble, to (at the top) a focused short paper that could be peer-marked.
The fact that each of these examples could be perceived as ‘learning and teaching activities’ demonstrates just how inseparable feedback, assessment and teaching are! Review each of these elements, starting at the bottom, and consider how you could use them to check the skill level of students and to provide feedback in real time. There are online or virtual versions of each of these activities too, so this guidance is not dictated by mode of learning.
Clearly, there are then post-session opportunities to test student learning progress and provide feedback:
- Using a classic online MCQ
- Discussion Fora
- Short paper – a template perhaps, a structured activity that forms the 5-minute opening section of the class next time.
All these techniques can, and do, work in most contexts and for most disciplines, but not all. You need to build your course design using the 8-SLDF to establish the meaningful opportunities and constraints for feedback in practice. Understanding the students’ needs will determine which are worth trying. Try to plan each theme/topic/seminar with a distinct, planned, feedback activity and remember to tell students that that is what it is.
Collaborative Effort
Ensuring that feedback is part of the learning culture within your learning environments requires clear, consistent repetition to students about the complexity, reality, and richness of feedback.
In addition to tutor feedback, it is important to stress that there are 4 distinct feedback models that can be designed into learning. You might reflect on and consider whether these are appropriate for your course design.
Co-Opt Others – this could be industry or sector colleagues. It could be students on the same programme but more advanced, or it could be ‘group on group’ and other peer forms of feedback. Design your activities with the feedback quality and workload in mind. In some contexts, students at higher levels could be required to provide feedback to more junior students as an assessed activity in its own right.
Self-assessment – students can be given marking rubrics or criteria and encouraged to self-assess. In a context where I wanted students to receive feedback on their interpersonal skills development, for example, I have handed out criteria for contributions at the end of seminars and asked students to complete them outside the session. In asking students whether they spoke freely or felt constrained, felt able to base their contributions on reading or subjective opinion, which peers’ contributions they valued most and why, the students became much more aware of both the value of the activity, its purpose and their responsibility within it.
Pairs and Triads – In some contexts, it is valuable to have students share their learning journey, to know that others share misconceptions and that others have different means to progress. In-class activity can be developed to encourage students to comment in pairs and triads. It may be possible to have students write short one-minute statements, for example, a definition or a succinct comment (itself a useful skill), and to write an imaginary name in the top right-hand corner. The forms can then be shuffled around the class and redistributed, and another student then reads out what is clearly not their contribution. This can be a good way to get students to give feedback on a student’s contribution without fear of offending.
Cohort Feedback – One useful time-saving, but effective technique, for ‘more feedback’ is to give the whole cohort feedback. This has the advantage of providing feedback where no single prompt may be evident. This could be a useful thing to do where there is a key learning point, a short 5-minute paper can be set in the last five minutes of class, all are collected and given a mark, but the feedback is provided to the whole cohort and students re-evaluate their work against the cohort’s feedback.
Current and immediate
Most teachers and students will agree that a face-to-face (or virtual one-to-one) meeting is the most effective way to deliver feedback. This allows both parties to be sure feedback is being received and understood. Whilst most institutions do not have the staffing resources to operate an Oxbridge tutorial model, we can take steps to ensure that, when we do provide personal feedback, we make the most of the opportunities. These notes apply to whole-class feedback as well as to individual tutorials.
We are all in the communications business. We communicate ideas, thoughts, notions, facts, and experiences. We try to interpret these things through language to students to build their knowledge and experiences. To do this, we use both nonverbal and verbal communication techniques without realising it. An effective teaching engagement, and distinctly true of feedback sessions, will require all of these factors to come into play. As a course design team, you can design in prompts for faculty to make sure they remember these factors:
| Nonverbal Behaviors | Verbal Behaviors |
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(Witt, 2016)
The best way to enhance feedback processes is to ensure that the programme team operates a supportive, developmental peer observation scheme.
Next Steps
A good place to start is by being honest about the quality of your feedback currently designed into your module or programme. A review of existing practice is always worthwhile. Review whatever formalised tools for feedback exist as a module or programme team. You could use these questions to begin to evaluate your course’s feedback.
How aligned is your Feedback to the TACTICS structure? Thinking about in-class feedback and that given on formative and summative assessments, how aligned are you with the TACTICS principles? You could also use Nicol’s 7 principles of good feedback practice as a checklist (Nicol & Macfarlane-Dick, 2006).
How effective is your feedback? Are you able to identify any impact of your feedback processes on your students’ learning gains?
How much feedback is offered? How many opportunities for feedback are identified explicitly in your course? Could you do more?
How many skills or attributes are reflected in your feedback? Given feedback is a continuous process, what feedback is offered for a broad range of skills and attributes that are (or are not) being assessed? Interpersonal skills, for example?
Are there technology solutions that could enhance feedback opportunities? Could there be audio feedback, video feedback or automated options to ensure context-specific and speedy feedback offered to students? Explore this JISC resource for details (Ferrell, 2013)
References
Ferrell, G. (2013). Changing assessment and feedback practice. Retrieved September 29, 2017, from https://www.jisc.ac.uk/guides/changing-assessment-and-feedback-practice
Nicol, D. J., & Macfarlane-Dick, D. (2006). Formative assessment and self-regulated learning: a model and seven principles of good feedback practice. Studies in Higher Education, 31(2), 199. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075070600572090
Witt, P. (2016). Communication and Learning. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG.