Area of Activity 3: Assess and Give Feedback to Learners

A3: Assess and give feedback to learners

K2, K3, K4, K5, K6, V1, V2, V3, V4

Introduction

There are many different levels of assessment and feedback, but essentially this constitutes the core of my role as an educational developer. In other words, providing staff and students with feedback on their practice is a fundamental element of my role. For that reason, the quality of the assessment design, the quality of the feedback, and the timeliness of the feedback I provide all create very important potential learning opportunities. The feedback I provide includes formal feedback and assessment, for example as part of the CPS programme or in the form of peer reviews of teaching, or feedback on drafts in my capacity as a postgraduate supervisor. However, it also includes continuous informal feedback and formative assessment, which are a crucial part of my everyday practice but are harder to measure, as the effects are intangible to some extent. This includes conversations, emails, and engagement in online forums and learning environments. This type of engagement contributes to learning and plays a key role in the mentoring process that is part of supporting postgraduate students and early (or earlier) career academics.

Peer assisted learning

At USQ, I was involved in the development and coordination of a Peer Assisted Study Sessions (PASS) programme, which is an Australian accredited programme, mirrored on the US-based Supplemental Instruction (SI) programme. In 2006, I successfully completed a PASS/SI Supervisor Accreditation course and gained a Certificate, which qualifies me to train so-called PASS leaders. Assessment, and in particular formative assessment, is a crucial element of the PASS programme, as it is her that student have an opportunity to receive formative feedback, which is timely, relevant and tailored to their individual needs. Thus, 'training the trainers' in providing high quality feedback is a crucial element of developing a successful peer-assisted study programme. It also relates closely to Boud and Falchikov's (2006) suggestions for what they refer to as 'aligning assessment with long-term learning'. As part of this notion, they further argue that "students need to become assessors within the context of participation in practice, that is, the kinds of highly contextualised learning faced in life and work" (2006, p. 399). Peer learning and peer-assisted learning programmes allow for exactly this type of 'assessment within practice'.

At USQ, we tailored it to localised student needs and we re-named it Meet-Up, a programme that is still running today. A key element of the Meet-Up programme was that we developed an online version of it to address the needs of the roughly 80% of USQ students who studied online (Huijser & Kimmins, 2006). At the time, we used MSN Messenger as the platform for peer-assisted learning sessions, but different online learning environments and tools have since been adapted to suit the programme. Obviously, there are other benefits to such a programme, for example the development of a sense of belonging to a learning community, but contextualised and formative assessment are key benefits.

Redesigning assessment as part of Problem-based Learning

Both at Bahrain Polytechnic, and currently at XJTLU, there is traditionally a strong focus on exam-based assessment. This goes very much against the idea of contextualised assessment, which is about providing feedback in context, and preferably in authentic contexts (Kek & Huijser, 2017). Such assessment in turn is a fundamental element of PBL, and it is important in research-led teaching and learning as well (Fung, 2016). High stakes examinations are unfit for the intentions of PBL because learning in PBL is an integral part of assessing, and vice versa. That is, students are constantly assessing themselves and their peers in the learning and teaching process and authentic (often work-based) activities.

In PBL, authentic problems or tasks and activities are used to motivate and engage students to share their present knowledge, share alternative ideas or hypotheses, search for information, evaluate and develop reasoned arguments to support, or disagree with, proposed solutions. And where possible, students and partners outside the university co-create the problem. Throughout the learning process, which includes formative feedback by peers and teachers, students reflect through self and peer assessment on their developing knowledge and competencies. Research has continuously found that PBL students, when compared to traditional forms of learning and teaching, are better able to transfer knowledge to new problems (Lu, Bridges, & Hmelo-Silver, 2014; Strobel & van Barneveld, 2009; Xian & Madhavan, 2013). In other words, PBL students are considered to be more apt as adaptive experts, having the opportunities to learn and developed a way-of-being that is flexible, and adapt to future contexts, both within and beyond the university. Assessment for learning is a central factor in that.

Overall, if the learning outcomes are about enabling students to become lifelong learners, not only do the teaching, curriculum, and learning outcomes have to focus squarely on knowledge, skills, and dispositions that can sustain students beyond current university studies, but the assessment practices and methods must also engage and facilitate students to be(come) lifelong learners. In short, the overall curriculum needs to be carefully (and constructively) aligned (Biggs & Tang, 2011). Again, assessment is a key element in this process.

Overall then, assessment is not a separate entity, and should therefore not be seen as such. It should be an integral part of the overall learning design, and ideally should occur in a contextualised manner. As a sector, we still have a long way to go in this respect.

The role of feedback in the postgraduate supervision process

Given the discussion above, you could argue that feedback is a hugely important part of the postgraduate student learning journey. This is all the more so because PhD students for example usually only have two supervisors, and three if they're lucky. It is surprising therefore that there appears to be very little training available for supervisors on how to provide effective feedback. As part of the CPS Programme that I teach into at XJTLU, I (co-)facilitate a workshop about effective feedback. This workshop is designed around Nicol's (2010) seven principles of effective feedback, namely that it has to be:

1. Understandable
2. Selective
3. Specific
4. Timely
5. Contextualised
6. Balanced
7. Personal

While all of these principles definitely apply to postgraduate supervision, they also provide a significant challenge, especially in the context of increasingly overloaded academic workloads. As part of my continuing role as Adjunct Researcher at Batchelor Institute, I supervise three Masters students and three PhD students. Each of these students work in isolation for long periods of time, because they are far removed from Batchelor's campus and therefore from there peers, at least physically. In this context, particularly the timeliness and personalised nature of the feedback I provide become very important. I therefore do whatever I can to provide feedback as soon as I can, and to provide it in a contextualised manner, which builds on previous feedback I have provided. Furthermore, I also make a special effort to provide feedback in multimodal formats (e.g. written and oral), which is particularly important in Indigenous contexts. Moreover, the personalised nature of the feedback is crucial because there is a very wide variety of educational and cultural backgrounds involved in the supervision process at Batchelor Institute. Finally, I also supervise two more PhD students (through USQ) who are based in remote Australia and Erbil (Iraq) respectively. In both cases, personalised, contextualised and especially timely feedback are vital. In providing this kind of feedback (which by the way is by definition always constructive as well), the fortunate by-product is that I am modelling professional practice, and modelling is in itself a form of effective feedback. 

Biggs, J., & Tang, C. (2011). Teaching for quality learning at university (4th ed.). Maidenhead: Open University Press.

Boud, D., & Falchikov, N. (2006). Aligning assessment with long-term learning. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 31(4), 399-413. 

Fung, D. (2016). Engaging students with research through a connected curriculum: An innovative institutional approach. Council on Undergraduate Research Quarterly, 38(2) (Winter), 30–35.

Huijser, H., & Kimmins, L. (2006). Developing a Peer-Assisted Learning Community through MSN Messenger: A Pilot Program of PALS Online. Learning on the Move Proceedings of the OLT 2006 Conference (pp. 49-56). Brisbane: Queensland University of Technology, 26 September 2006.

Kek, M. Y. C. A., & Huijser, H. (2017). Problem-based learning into the future: Imagining an agile PBL ecology for learning. Singapore: Springer.

Lu, J., Bridges, S., & Hmelo-Silver, C. E. (2014). Problem-based learning. In K. R. Sawyer (Ed.), The Cambridge handbook of the learning sciences (2nd ed., pp. 298-318). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Nicol, D. (2010). From monologue to dialogue: Improving written feedback processes in mass higher education. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 35(5), 501-517.

Strobel, J., & Van Barneveld, A. (2009). When is PBL more effective? A meta-synthesis of meta-analyses comparing PBL to conventional classrooms. Interdisciplinary Journal of Problem-based Learning, 3(1), 44-58.

Xian, H., & Madhavan, K. (2013). Building on and honouring forty years of PBL scholarship from Howard Barrows: A scientometric, large-scale data, and visualization-based analysis. Interdisciplinary Journal of Problem-based Learning, 7(1), 132-156.