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

200 ❘
Teaching, supervising, learning
FOCUS AND TIMING
The kinds of evaluative feedback which are sought will depend on both motives and
focus. Thus feedback which is collected for extrinsic purposes usually has to fulfil a set
of formal requirements, at least in part, whereas individuals or course teams collecting
feedback for their own purposes usually have much greater scope over what kinds of
feedback they collect and in what form. In either case careful consideration has to be
given to what would be the most appropriate focus for feedback in any given instance.
If, for example, the intention is to capture as full and rounded a picture as possible of
teaching in its various guises, then the equivalent of a wide-angle lens will be needed. This
can encompass questions of course design and structure, teaching-learning strategies,
academic guidance and support, and approaches to assessment, together with
interrelationships between these. But there may also be occasions when the overriding
concern is with a specific aspect of teaching such as an e-learning activity or a new
approach to giving students feedback on their assignments, and where only a close-up
will capture the kind of fine-grained information being sought.
These considerations will be influential in determining not only how and from whom
feedback is to be sought (as will be apparent below) but also when it is to be elicited – a
dimension of evaluation that is often overlooked. There is the widespread but
questionable practice, for example, of waiting until the end of a course before canvassing
student opinion, usually on the grounds that the students need to have experienced the
whole course before they can effectively comment on it. But one consequence is that
students often find it difficult to recall with much precision a series of practical classes,
say, or a coursework assignment that took place several months previously. A second
consequence is that none of the issues or concerns that students raise will be addressed
in time for them to derive any benefit – a situation which is not conducive to good teaching
and likely to undermine students’ interest in providing worthwhile feedback. No less
seriously, especially in universities where exams continue to carry a substantial weighting
in overall assessment, students’ perceptions of exams frequently go unsurveyed because
evaluation questionnaires are usually distributed and completed before examination
diets get underway (Hounsell et al., 2007).
Interrogating practice
At what points in your teaching do you gather feedback from students? Does
this give you time to respond to issues they raise?
SOURCES OF FEEDBACK
In contemporary practice in higher education, there are three principal sources of
feedback that are widely recognised. These are: