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

206 ❘
Teaching, supervising, learning
How well did I . . . ?
Well
Satisfactory
Not very
well
• make sure that students had the necessary
materials, instructions, equipment, etc.
• get the fieldwork under way promptly;
• try to ensure that all the set tasks were
completed in the time available;
• keep track of progress across the whole class;
• handle students’ questions and queries;
• provide help when students encountered difficulties;
• respond to students as individuals;
• help sustain students’ interest;
• bring things to a close and indicate follow-up tasks.
ANALYSING AND INTERPRETING FEEDBACK
Any technique for obtaining feedback is going to yield data that need to be analysed and
interpreted. Some techniques (e.g. structured group discussion) can generate feedback in
a form which is already categorised and prioritised, while questionnaires can be designed
in a format which allows the data to be captured by an OMR (optical mark reader) or, in
some institutions, processed by a central support service. Increasingly, Web-based
systems are being introduced which invite students to respond to multiple choice
questions (MCQs) and enter comments in text boxes. From these, different types of report
can be generated. Yet while possibilities such as these do save time and effort, there are
few or no short-cuts to analysis and interpretation, since these are not processes that can
be delegated to others. There is a body of thought, as Bligh has noted, which contends
that the actions of a lecturer and the students’ response to that lecturer (as represented in
the feedback they provide) are not accessible to an outside observer or independent
evaluator, but can only be properly understood ‘in the light of their intentions, perceptions
and the whole background of their knowledge and assumptions’ (Bligh, 1998: 166). While
this may risk overstating the case, it does make a telling point: the teacher of a course is
in a unique position to make sense of feedback and to weigh its significance against a
knowledge of the subject matter in question, the teaching aims and objectives, and the
interests, aspirations and capabilities of the students who provided the feedback.
Equally crucially, it has to be acknowledged that analysing and interpreting feedback
can benefit from the involvement of others – those without a direct stake in teaching or
assessing on the course concerned. First, interpreting feedback from our students is an
emotional business (Hendry et al., 2005), and it is easy to fall into one of two traps: