A Handbook for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Enhancing academic and Practice

142 ❘
Teaching, supervising, learning
achievement orientated and will do whatever is required to achieve the best possible
marks (Entwistle, 1998). Making assessment criteria explicit does not, of itself, enable
students to produce better work (O’Donovan et al., 2001) because unless they engage
actively in some way with the criteria, they are unlikely to benefit. This is a further
argument for encouraging students to self-assess; to have some part to play in devising
assessment criteria and indeed in the assessment tasks themselves. Providing workshops
on core assessment criteria can be helpful but, if voluntary, these are attended by relatively
few students (Norton et al., 2005).
4 Provides opportunities to close the gap between current and desired performance
This can be done mainly through staged assessment and/or formative assessment, since
feedback which is given at the end of the course is likely to have little effect on students’
learning – a problem that is exacerbated with provision of a higher education experience
in modules, where the learning is fragmentary and the opportunities for slow learning
as advocated by Yorke (2003) may be non-existent. Prowse et al. (2007) developed a
feedback process carried out in four stages: (1) first submission of written work, (2) written
feedback, (3) viva on student understanding of the feedback, (4) final submission of
written work. Grade points increased as did student satisfaction but the authors were
faced with resistance from the school quality committee. Research such as this shows that
it can sometimes be very difficult to bring about change even when it demonstrably
enhances student learning.
5 Delivers high-quality information to students about their learning
Feedback that is written can lead to all kinds of misinterpretation but there are many
other ways of informing students about their progress such as the personal response
system, sometimes known as ‘clickers’. Students are given electronic handheld devices
and choose answers out of a given array, results are displayed instantly and electronically
and feedback given as to the right answer as well as, if necessary, an explanation. This not
only enables lecturers to correct misunderstandings but also gives them a good idea of
how students are learning.
6 Encourages positive motivational beliefs and self-esteem
This can, in practice, be very difficult to do when students tend to be more influenced by
the grade they receive than the feedback comments (Hounsell et al., 2005). This leaves us
with a dilemma, as we cannot give high grades to boost self-esteem, but we can be very
careful indeed with our written remarks and if, at all possible, support with verbal
feedback, which is much easier to moderate, if a student appears discomfited, puzzled
or demoralised.
7 Provides information to teachers that may be used to help shape the teaching
In thinking about effective feedback to give to students there is a double pay-off in that
it enables us to realise very directly how and what our students are learning. A useful way