Assessment and Feedback – Assessment patch
Face-to-face verbal feedback
As highlighted in Appendix 4, according to the students’ views captured by the Higher Education Academy (HEA) video clip, students prefer verbal feedback. As a result, I chose to employ this approach to feed back to two M.Ed students. Both students had unfortunately failed their first Master’s Level assignment and were subsequently offered a one-to-one feedback tutorial to support them towards their resubmission (V2). The students had already received written feedback from another marker although I had cross-marked their submissions. In preparation for the tutorial I re-read their scripts, made notes on the scripts and also highlighted the key points for discussion from their written feedback (A3).
One of the students came to my office and I went to the other’s school. Surprisingly, I found the former a more daunting prospect. This seems counterintuitive as being in familiar surroundings should provide you with a sense of security but in fact I found being in the student’s environment enabled me to be more structured and focused and forced me to be well-prepared in advance so that I had everything with me to aid our discussions (A4). Handley et al. (2007) suggest that one of the reasons students are reluctant to seek feedback is because they often have to meet their tutor in an academic office and they find this a threatening prospect. I can appreciate this and will certainly consider this when organising meetings in the future.
The purpose of the feedback session was not for me to tell the students how to improve their work but to coach them to identify what they could change and how they could do this. Coaching questions need to be open, probing and fashioned in advance to be high quality and effective (A4). Coaching can be a tricky thing to do as often students just want you to tell them what to do to pass. This relates back to Developing and Evaluating Your Teaching – Appendix 1. In this case, as the students were clear about the purpose of the feedback session and had come prepared with specific questions about their work, the coaching strategy did work.
I think it is important to note that feedback should not just be about one person telling another what has gone right or not but is about having a conversation. The difficulty with feedback lies in our lack of a common understanding of its purpose, our attitude towards it and the clarity of explanation of what students can expect from it (K3). Ashwin et al. (2015) also identify that students have to take initiative in doing something with feedback as otherwise providing feedback has little impact on learning.
Advantages of verbal feedback
- ability to iron out misunderstandings
- it is specific and individual
- there is the opportunity to build up a personal relationship with individuals
Disadvantages of verbal feedback:
- often there is no record of the feedback given
- it can be too positive
It can be difficult to be completely honest and open when speaking to someone face-to-face and sometimes more difficult to prepare in advance for discussions. Conversely, one can ask questions for clarification and identify specific issues pertinent to the individual.
Both of the feedback tutorials were purposeful, focused and met the individual needs of the students, ultimately leading to successful resubmissions.
