Loughborough University’s centrally supported student response system, Vevox, allows staff to create engaging classes through real-time polling and live discussion, but it also contains a survey feature that staff are starting to use to gather mid-module feedback. Creating a survey provides more time to act on valuable feedback from students and implement changes before moduleRead more
Background More and more Schools within Loughborough University are looking at ways in which they can develop consistency within marking and feedback. Additionally, they are moving towards online submission to support this. As a result, colleagues are looking at ways that they can use rubrics or grid marking schemes to feedback electronically in an efficientRead more
It is a common occurrence to hear staff express concerns about how feedback is used, but it’s often unclear what the expectations around feedback are for both students and staff. Simon Martin, Department of Materials (AACME), recently a conducted a survey that was aimed at establishing just how much student and staff attitudes to feedbackRead more
2010 Teaching Innovation Awards winners, Dr Lawrence Leger and Dr Karligash Glass (Kenjegalieva), have recently published their work in Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education. Their research article, ‘What if best practice is too expensive? Feedback on oral presentations and efficient use of resources’, suggests that ‘less resource-intensive [teaching and learning] methods need not compromiseRead more
In this last blog post in ‘Focus On… Feedback’ month, Dr Valerie Pinfield, who is a lecturer in Chemical Engineering, shares her thinking on giving feedback to students. I wanted to produce a quick-reference guide for staff to check the feedback that we/they are giving to students, and ensure that it has the effect ofRead more
There is accumulating evidence that on-line marking and feedback can be more effective and efficient than traditional paper-based methods. Thus using technology, to deliver feedback can have several benefits:
- It allows us to provide more feedback in less time through the use of repeated comments;
- It helps provide more detailed feedback through the use of in-text annotations and general comments;
- It can help develop a stronger link between marking criteria, feedback and the grade through the additional use of a rubric.
What is GradeMark?
GradeMark is an on-line marking system which is part of Turnitin (often used to check originality), and can be accessed via Learn.
A common concern expressed by staff is that students do not make full use of the feedback provided.
Given the huge investment of time and energy in the assessment process by staff and students, this does seem to be an area worthy of further consideration.
Research indicates that staff and student views about feedback do not always coincide – staff believe that the feedback they provide will aid student learning yet students state that they do not understand the feedback nor do they know how to seek support to improve. This situation is compounded by students being unsure of their role within the assessment process and being unprepared to receive and act on feedback.
So what can be done?
The first CAP Forum, focusing on assessment, will now be held on Friday March 6th (time to be advised shortly) and will cover the February Focus On… topic of feedback as well.Read more
Three years ago, a number of Engineering Schools approached The Centre for Engineering and Design Education (CEDE), requesting the Centre’s help to unpick, from the students’ perspective, the assessment and feedback issues that were being highlighted by the National Student Survey (NSS). Their goal was to identify what the School could do strategically to enhanceRead more
TurnItIn have recently announced their Grade Anything initiative, which allows the system to accept files of any type for evaluation. Obviously the text-matching will only work with files containing text. However the GradeMark online marking tool is now applicable for a much wider variety of student coursework, as is demonstrated on their video clips . Don’tRead more