A presentation from the STEM Annual Conference 2014.
It is universally acknowledged that feedback plays a key role in the learning process but it is also clear that there are many challenges to the provision of effective feedback. A common complaint from staff is that students do not use feedback and may not even collect their graded work. Recent research suggests that although the majority of students do pay attention to feedback it is apparent that students may not be able to utilise feedback effectively for example because the feedback has not been understood or the student cannot see the relevance of the feedback to future work (feed-forward). In our own taught postgraduate programme we had noted for one student that identical issues had been raised in feedback on sequential items of coursework but had not been corrected and in conversation with another student it transpired that the grade given influenced whether feedback was read (poor grade = can’t face reading feedback and good grade = job done so why read feedback?). Formalized reflection by students in order to improve their utilization of feedback has been reported in some studies and this is the direction we decided to take. During the first year of introducing short written reflections on feedback we found the majority of students to be in favour and some student comments indicated a change in their approach to using feedback. One interesting finding was that the group of students who wrote the best reflections made significant improvements in grades whilst the group of students who tended to reiterate feedback comments demonstrated no improvement. In the second year we will be attempting to improve students’ use of reflection and will also trial the practice of withholding of grades until reflection is submitted to allow greater focus on the feedback itself.
