Literature as a Guide
We worked on both our feedback and assessment practice throughout the semester but in the interests of brevity, this case study will focus on the feedback plan, its outcomes and wider conclusions that can be drawn from the evidence gathered. It is important to state, however, that none of this would have been possible without the backdrop of a more participative, student-led assessment approach.
I turned to feedback literature to guide me. An underlying guide to my case study has been the work of Winstone and Nash regarding what barriers students hit when faced with feedback. I have been mindful of the 4 barriers in their work and have attempted to address them when creating my suite of feedback strategies. The four barriers, according to Winstone and Nash are: 1. Lack of awareness of what feedback actually is; 2. Lack of cognisance of appropriate strategies for putting feedback into use; 3. Perceived lack of agency to implement those strategies; 4. Lack of volition to engage with feedback (Winstone and Nash 2016).
Another of the most recent and relevant areas of research for our case study is the re-framing of feedback from a ‘uni-directional’ transmission of information to dialogue between teacher and student and/ or peers (Nicol 2010, Carless 2013). However, seminal authors are clear to point out that creating the conversation is just the start of making feedback meaningful and does not guarantee any real learning in itself (Carless 2013).
Unless the learner is able ‘to decode…[and]…internalise’ the feedback message and re-evaluate his/her work based on the conversation, then such a conversation is at most an ‘exchange of ideas’ (Carless 2013, McArthur and Huxham 2013 in Y1 Feedback 2016) Carless argues that feedback is only feedback when the student is able to do something valuable with it because ‘information only becomes feedback when it is used productively’ (Carless 2015 in Y1 Feedback 2016).
I began to explore how I could get my students to engage with my feedback and do something productive with it. I decided on creating an assessment scenario which made every piece of feedback relevant to the next piece of assessment. I used a linked assignment method which fed forward into the next assessment piece and the next (Y1 feedback 2016). I built up an assessment platform which allowed students to look at different concepts in each assessment piece but develop the same hard-to grasp competencies as a continuum running through all assessment elements. I began to wonder that by keeping the rules of the game simple, would students risk higher order thinking in terms of content?
Feed forward in feedback literature is discussed with frequency and the need to create ‘opportunities to close the gap between current and desired performance’ is widely asserted (Nicol and Macfarlane-Dick 2006). As the Y1 feedback consortium state, ‘feedforward looks beyond the context of the current piece of work towards future assessments, modules…and provides guidance on how to improve future performance’ (Evans 2013, Walker 2013, Ferrell and Gray 2015 in Y1 Feedback 2016).