I led a workshop on ‘Making Assessment and Formative Feedback More Effective and Manageable’ at Environmental Sciences yesterday at 1400-1630, where among other things I asked participants to prioritise the top 9 of 14 ideas I introduced for doing so. I’ve divided the slides into two files the ‘main’ is the short file about the 14 suggestions, and the ‘sides’ comprise the big file of bits and pieces of background and tasks which we did.
UEA-main-w.pptx (539 downloads)
UEA-sides-w.pptx (525 downloads)
In the spirit of the principles of feedback dialogue, I’ve now added a transcript of the post-its you completed at the start of the workshop, annotated with my brief replies to the points each of you raised.
Post-its-and-dialogue-w.docx (523 downloads)
I feel that you’ve moved ‘out of kilter’ with many institutions in the sector, in that I don’t believe in marking any work twice, once in draft and the next as ‘final’, with feedback at both stages. Also, as you know, feedback comments on summative work are rarely really useful to students. I know you’re doing some of these things with the best of intentions for your students, but the tasks you have set yourselves bring far too much strain – and even create some ‘learned dependency’ among students, where it’s best to use assessment to liberate them from dependency. In the ‘sides’ file, I’ve now included several extra elements which I hope will help you see the bigger picture, and gain some further ideas for new ways of moving forward with formative feedback – especially the essential ‘dialogue’ elements we discussed.
You can follow the event on Twitter using the hashtag #philatuea. Thanks to Dr Gill Seyfang for arranging this event.