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Reconceptualising Feedback in Higher Education

Developing dialogue with students

Edited by Stephen Merry, Margaret Price, David Carless, Maddalena Taras

Published May 9th 2013 by Routledge – 218 pages

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Description

Feedback is a crucial element of teaching, learning and assessment. There is, however, substantial evidence that staff and students are dissatisfied with it, and there is growing impetus for change.

Student Surveys have indicated that feedback is one of the most problematic aspects of the student experience, and so particularly in need of further scrutiny. Current practices waste both student learning potential and staff resources. Up until now the ways of addressing these problems has been through relatively minor interventions based on the established model of feedback providing information, but the change that is required is more fundamental and far reaching.

Reconceptualising Feedback in Higher Education, coming from a think-tank composed of specialist expertise in assessment feedback, is a direct and more fundamental response to the impetus for change. Its purpose is to challenge established beliefs and practices through critical evaluation of evidence and discussion of the renewal of current feedback practices. In promoting a new conceptualisation and a repositioning of assessment feedback within an enhanced and more coherent paradigm of student learning, this book:

• analyses the current issues in feedback practice and their implications for student learning.

• identifies the key characteristics of effective feedback practices

• explores the changes needed to feedback practice and how they can be brought about

• illustrates through examples how processes to promote and sustain effective feedback practices can be embedded in modern mass higher education.

Provoking academics to think afresh about the way they conceptualise and utilise feedback, this book will help those with responsibility for strategic development of assessment at an institutional level, educational developers, course management teams, researchers, tutors and student representatives.

Contents

CONTENTS

　

Notes on Contributors

Foreword (Marcia Mentkowski)

Overview (Stephen Merry)

　

SECTION 1: CURRENT THINKING

  1. Section Overview

    2. Maddalena Taras

    A. The Student Voice

  2. Surveys of ‘the Student Experience’ and the Politics of Feedback

    3. Mantz Yorke

  3. Feedback - What Students Want

    4. Alex Bols and Kate Wicklow

    B. The Wider Picture: challenges to preconceptions

  4. Feedback on Feedback: uncrossing wires across sectors

    5. Maddalena Taras

  5. Assessment Feedback: an ‘Agenda for Change’

    6. Margaret Price, Karen Handley, Berry O’Donovan, Chris Rust and Jill Millar

    C. Principles and Practices

  6. Opening up Feedback: teaching learners to see

    7. D. Royce Sadler

  7. Building ‘standards’ frameworks’: the role of guidance and feedback in supporting the achievement of learners

    8. Sue Bloxham

    SECTION 2: ENHANCING THE STUDENT ROLE IN THE FEEDBACK PROCESS

  8. Section Overview

    9. David Carless

    A. Students

  9. Involving Students in the Scholarship of Assessment: student voices on the feedback ‘Agenda for Change’

    10. Kay Sambell

  10. Feedback Unbound: from master to usher

    11. Jan McArthur and Mark Huxham

  11. Feedback and Feedforward: student responses and their implications

    12. Mirabelle Walker

    B. Tutors

  12. Sustainable Feedback and the Development of Student Self-evaluative Capacities

    13. David Carless

  13. Students’ Social Learning Practice as a Way of Learning from Tutor Feedback

    14. Paul Orsmond, Stephen Merry and Karen Handley

  14. Integrating Feedback with Classroom Teaching: using exemplars to scaffold learning

    15. Graham Hendry

    SECTION 3: FOSTERING INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE

  15. Section Overview

    16. Margaret Price

  16. An Assessment Compact: changing the way an institution thinks about assessment and feedback

    17. Chris Rust, Margaret Price, Karen Handley, Berry O’Donovan and Jill Millar

  17. Fostering Institutional Change in Feedback Practice through Partnership

    18. Graham Holden and Chris Glover

  18. Making Learning-Oriented Assessment the Experience of all our Students: supporting institutional change

    19. Mark Russell, Dominic Bygate and Helen Barefoot

  19. Achieving Transformational or Sustainable Educational Change

Steve Draper and David Nicol

Conclusion and Reflections (Stephen Merry, Margaret Price, David Carless and Maddalena Taras)

Index

Author Bio

Stephen Merry is Senior Lecturer in Cell Biology in the Faculty of Computing, Engineering and Sciences at Staffordshire University.

Margaret Price is Professor in Learning and Assessment at Oxford Brookes University.

David Carless is Professor of Educational Assessment at the University of Hong Kong.

Maddalena Taras is Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Education and Society at the University of Sunderland.

Name: Reconceptualising Feedback in Higher Education: Developing dialogue with students (Paperback) – Routledge 
Description: Edited by Stephen Merry, Margaret Price, David Carless, Maddalena Taras. Feedback is a crucial element of teaching, learning and assessment. There is, however, substantial evidence that staff and students are dissatisfied with it, and there is growing impetus for change. Student Surveys have indicated that feedback is one of...
Categories: Higher Education, Adult Education and Lifelong Learning