This document summarizes a presentation on improving feedback practices between students and instructors. It discusses issues with current feedback, such as feedback being too late to incorporate into future work, instructors not knowing individual students, and inconsistencies in grading standards between instructors. The presentation provides suggestions for more dialogic feedback such as using audio/video feedback, peer feedback, and question-based feedback. It also discusses internalizing goals and standards through activities like discussing rubrics, exemplars, and calibration exercises between instructors. The goal is to move from a transmission model of feedback to a more social constructivist model of active engagement between students and instructors.

1. Interactive TESTA masterclass
Part 2
@solentlearning
@tansyjtweets
Tansy Jessop
TESTA Project Leader
Durham University
3 May 2018

2. Theme 2: Disconnected feedback

3. The feedback is
generally focused
on the module
Because it’s at the end
of the module, it doesn’t
feed into our future
work.
If It’s difficult because your
assignments are so detached
from the next one you do for
that subject. They don’t
relate to each other.
I read it and think “Well,
that’s fine but I’ve already
handed it in now and got the
mark. It’s too late”.
STRUCTURAL

4. It was like ‘Who’s
Holly?’ It’s that
relationship where
you’re just a student.
Because they have to mark so
many that our essay becomes
lost in the sea that they have
to mark.
Here they say ‘Oh yes, I don’t
know who you are. Got too
many to remember, don’t
really care, I’ll mark you on
your assignment’.
RELATIONAL

5. A feedback dialogue

6. Irretrievable breakdown…
Your essay lacked structure and
your referencing is problematic
Your classes are boring and I
don’t really like you 

7. Ways to be dialogic
• Conversation: who starts the dialogue?
• Cycles of reflection across modules
• Quick generic feedback
• Feedback synthesis tasks
• Peer feedback (especially on formative)
• Technology: audio, screencast and blogging
• From feedback as ‘telling’…
• … to feedback as asking questions

8. Students feedback to us

9. Students to lecturers:
Critical Incident Questionnaire
Stephen Brookfield’s Critical Incident Questionnaire http://bit.ly/1loUzq0

10. Pause, review, discuss
(in discipline area groups?)
• What one feedback problem raised in TESTA
data resonates for you?
• What ideas or practices presented would work
in your context (or are already working)? Any
new and different ideas?
• How can you implement these ideas to engage
students meaningfully in using feedback?

11. Feedback manifesto
Groups work together to produce a set of feedback
principles that they commit to embedding in their
programmes. Flipchart paper on walls in plenary.

12. Theme 3: Confusion about goals and
standards
• Consistently low scores on the AEQ for clear
goals and standards
• Alienation from the tools, especially criteria
and guidelines
• Symptoms: perceptions of marker variation,
unfair standards and inconsistencies in practice

13. We’ve got two
tutors- one marks
completely differently
to the other and it’s
pot luck which one
you get.
They read the essay and then
they get a general impression,
then they pluck a mark from
the air.
It’s like Russian
roulette – you may
shoot yourself and
then get an A1.
They have different
criteria, they build up their
own criteria.

14. There are criteria, but I find them really
strange. There’s “writing coherently,
making sure the argument that you
present is backed up with evidence”.

15. Implicit
Criteria
Explicit
Written
I justify
Co-creation
and
participation
Active
engagement
by students

16. Taking action: internalising goals and
standards
• Regular calibration exercises
• Discussion and dialogue
• Discipline specific criteria (not cut and paste)
Lecturers
• Rewrite/co-create criteria
• Marking exercises
• Discussing range of exemplars
Lecturers
and students
• Enter secret garden - peer review
• Engage in drafting processes
• Self-reflection
Students

17. How not to do it: reverse engineering
How not to get an idea of
standards: Students
Half the participants work in
groups of five using flipchart
paper to design a system to
ensure that students never
come to know what ‘good’
looks like.
Use flipchart paper, text and
drawings.
How not to mark to a
common standard: Academics
The other half design a system
which ensures that academics
are prevented from marking to
the same standard.
Use flipchart paper, text and
drawings.

18. From this educational paradigm…

19. The transmission model

20. Social constructivist
model

21. References
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and Teaching in Higher Education. 1(1): 3-31.
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High-stakes grading and the case for slow scholarship’, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education.
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comparative study. Studies in Higher Education. Published Online 27 August 2014
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study of students’ learning in response to different assessment patterns. Assessment and Evaluation in
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