Maximising accessibility of feedback in HEI whilst working within work allocation constraints

Wilkinson, Amanda; Witt, Marcus; Allen, Kane; Law, Ali; Wilkinson, Matt

Abstract

As stated in your call for contributions, "Within an inclusive, competence-based model of education, the integration of assessment to support the student's progression and the use of feedback to enable reflection, is key to providing a space for growth and success (Faulconer et al, 2022; McCarthy, 2017)." Focusing on feedback specifically, feedback from assessment has been argued to be a key influencer in differences in attainment, retention and satisfaction rates (Hanesworth, 2019), and how feedback is delivered and how accessible it is, is a strong focus in a recent Inclusive Assessment toolkit emerging from a QAA Collaborative Enhancement Project (2022).

These trends in policy and research, in conjunction with our own observations that students were struggling to interpret and access written feedback, led a group of us to trial giving 20 level 5 students live feedback after an essay. We ensured that we worked within our time allocation, and that we reflected on the experience from both a student perspective and a marker perspective, to enable us to collate a practical set of lessons learnt that can be easily applied to other settings.

Key themes we would like to debate and discuss include:
• feedback was more accessible in this form; students felt they had agency to act on it
• the process felt more collaborative; students felt that they could build a relationship with their marker
• marking felt more efficient and effective; markers seemed to be able to more quickly draw out one or two key feed-forwards to work with the students on when they arrived for their live feedback slot and were able to address misunderstandings live and in the moment
• a larger than representative proportion of non-traditional students opted to engage in our pilot. What is the driver for this?
Our initial reflections fit within the larger context of inclusion as discussed above and also align with key themes in the literature: feedback is emotive and benefits from relationships between students and markers (Pitt & Quinlan, 2022); autonomy and self-efficacy are highly important in the feedback process (Evans & Waring, 2020); co-constructed dialogue between the marker and the student is highly powerful (Lorber et al., 2019).

We envisage this debate being an opportunity to draw out the tensions between research and policy and the practicalities of a live feedback approach. Delegates will leave the session with practical but informed ideas to take forward.

Citation

Wilkinson, A., Witt, M., Allen, K., Law, A., & Wilkinson, M. (2023, July). Maximising accessibility of feedback in HEI whilst working within work allocation constraints. Presented at 2023 Teaching and Learning Conference: Assessment and feedback for student success

• Presentation Conference Type: Speech
• Conference Name: 2023 Teaching and Learning Conference: Assessment and feedback for student success
• Start Date: Jul 12, 2023
• Deposit Date: Aug 10, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Aug 11, 2023
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/10941557