The Centre for Education Enhancement in the Business School held its second event on 26th July. Dr Rob Nash is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Aston whose main interests are memory and cognition. Dr Nash talked us through his research into ‘what you say and what they hear’ looking at assessment and feedback.
Using the sector wide issue of assessment and feedback scores in the National Student Survey (NSS) as a backdrop, Dr Nash talked about many of the challenges in this area such as students passing judgement on feedback when many of them may not have accessed feedback at all. Students also often hold the problematic view that feedback will somehow act automatically and don’t always see it as their responsibility to put it into action. Encouraging students to see how to implement feedback they receive is key, in having them recognise the feedback process as a dialogue.
Discussion was had around why students don’t act on feedback. Staff in attendance suggested; acceptance of the mark (“if it’s about what I thought it would be then I don’t need to follow up”), the need for tangible outcomes (i.e. grades being changed). The personal and emotional nature of feedback was also mentioned as a reason students do not act after they receive feedback.
Dr Nash shared possible solutions to engaging students with feedback pictured below (Winstone, Nash, Parker and Rowntree, 2017);
These include; encouraging students to keep a log of the feedback they receive, giving feedback to peers before submission and setting goals before accessing feedback.
This was an extremely valuable lecture which allowed staff to have an insight into ways of engaging students in the feedback process, from long term strategies to small in-course changes (without changing teaching). What was clear is that students need support in engaging with their feedback.