Professor Margaret Price's Keynote presentation from #MdxALTC15

1. What makes good feedback
good?
Prof. Margaret Price
Director,
ASKe Pedagogy Research Centre
Faculty of Business
http://www.brookes.ac.uk/aske

2. Dynamic Assessment Context
Assessment
Massification
Assessment
diversity
Holisticapproach to
assessment
Assessment
driveslearning
Transparency and
accountability
Modularity
Purpose of Assessment– various stakeholders
Fragmentation
of communities
Target culture
Authenticassessment
Uniform QualityAssurance and
accreditation systems
(Bologna 1999)
Employability
outcomes
Cultural diversity and
internationalisation of
curriculum
Academic Literacies
National Student
Survey
League
tables
Student
engagement

3. Change in HE and effects
on assessment
Pedagogic developments (e.g. acknowledgement
of assessment as key driver of learning, dialogic feedback;
discourse of assessment – fairness, cheating, grade
inflation; complexity of assessment)
Measurement in HE (e.g.league tables, quality
processes and measures, fragmentation).
Student voice (fees, influence of prior education,
student engagement)
Market (employability, graduate jobs, authenticity in
assessment)

4. There has been quite a
bit of research on
feedback…
Most focuses on the student experience of feedback
• Don’t read it (Hounsell,1987; Gibbs and Simpson, 2002)
• Too vague (Higgins, 2000; Walker, 2009)
• Not understood (Lea and Street, 1998; Weaver 2006;
Sadler 2010)
• Subject to interpretation (Ridsdale, 2003; Orsmond and
Merry, 2011)
• Unidirectional (Nicol 2010)
• Seen as a self contained event (Carless 2011)
• Damages self-efficacy (Wotjas, 1998)
• Seen as not ‘relational’ to the student (Price et al. 2010)

5. The aim of the project:
to understand better the domains
that influence whether
feedback is viewed as ‘good’
or ‘bad’ by students (and in
NSS scores).
What makes good
feedback good?
An ASKe Pedagogy Research Centre project in
collaboration with Cardiff, funded by the HEA

6. Domains pertaining to the feedback
itself (the traditional focus of advice to improve
feedback)
 Technical factors – legibility and detail – if the feedback
is not legible or able to be interpreted (incomprehensible
ticks/remarks) then students were dissatisfied with the
feedback
 Particularity of feedback – evidence of engagement with
particular piece of work, personalisation valued over
‘standardised criterion-based feedback
 Recognition of student effort – evidence of time spent
by markers as well as supportive detail.

7. Domains relating to the
context of feedback
 Assessment design - clarity of purpose, relevance, realistic
(e.g word count, time)
 Feedback pre-conditions – clear criteria, task, instructions…
dialogue.
 Marker predictability – particularly if the marker is not the
person who had briefed them or provided formative feedback.
Sites of Silence
 Timing
 Design of assessment patterns

8. Domains pertaining to the
development & expectations of
the student
 Student mark expectations – some influence but not
overwhelming. Effort often equated with marks and influences the
type of feedback seen as useful.
 Student epistemology, resilience and beliefs
–dualistic students and model answers and specificity;
–intrinsic (learning) and extrinsic (mark) motivations.
–poor self evalaution and reliance on feedback
–criticism, critique, transaction or conversation

10. Domains pertaining to the
development & expectations of
the student
 Student mark expectations – some influence but not
overwhelming. Effort often equated with marks and influences the
type of feedback seen as useful.
 Student epistemology, resilience and beliefs
–dualistic students and model answers and specificity;
–intrinsic (learning) and extrinsic (mark) motivations.
–poor self evalaution and reliance on feedback
–criticism, critique, transaction or conversation

11. Overview
 Domains overlap, compensate each other, have strong
interrelationships, are not mutually exclusive.
 Domains of influence are not causal, prioritised, they are
context dependent and influences outside the ‘feedback’
artefact are important.
 Student perceptions of feedback are shaped by:
• Some aspects of the feedback itself – a necessary but insufficient
condition for feedback being seen as good
• Pre-feedback conditions
• Qualities and perspectives of the student

12. What can we do?
Feedback itself
 Technical factors
 Particularity of feedback
 Recognition of student effort
Time – there are no economies of scale in assessment
Staff training, development and support
Limit anonymous feedback

13. What can we do?
The context of feedback
 Assessment design
–https://www.plymouth.ac.uk/uploads/production/document/path/2/2559/
assignment_brief_design_guidelines.pdf
–Team approach to design
 Feedback pre-conditions
–Situate feedback in on-going dialogue.
(consider class sizes, availability of staff, allocation of class time
to briefing and discussion)
 Marker predictability
–Avoid contracting out marking
–Clarity about purpose and expectations of assessment to avoid
mismatch between formative and final feedback.

14. What can we do?
The development &
expectations of the student
 Student mark expectations
–Develop students’ self evaluative abilities
 Student epistemology, resilience and beliefs
–Develop students’ assessment literacy

15. Assessment Literacy
appreciation of assessment’s relationship to
learning;
conceptual understanding of assessment
understanding of the nature, meaning and
level of assessment criteria and standards;
skills in self- and peer assessment;
familiarity with technical approaches to
assessment
possession of the intellectual ability to select
and apply appropriate approaches and
techniques to assessed tasks
(Price et al, 2012)

16. Intentional development of
assessment literacy
What can we do?
1.Planning at programme level
2.Pre-assessment
3.Assessment activity
4.Post assessment (Feedback)
5.Beyond the programme
16

17. Take a programme view
• Staff team need a programme view
Where there is a greater sense of the holistic programme, students
are more likely to achieve the learning outcomes than students on
programmes with a more fragmented sense of the programme.
(Havnes 2007)
•Develop assessment strategy
including intentional development of assessment literacy at key
points in programme

18. Active
engagement
with feedback
Explicit
Criteria
Completion andsubmission of
work
Students
Active
engagementwith criteria
Rust C.,O’Donovan B. & Price M. (2005)
Developing assessment
literacy

19. Developing assessment
literacy: pre assessment
• Students need to
• know how to negotiate the assignment
task
• understand expectations
• learn self efficacy to enable
independence

20. Active
engagement
with feedback
Explicit
Criteria
Completion andsubmission of
work
Students
Active
engagementwith criteria
Rust C.,O’Donovan B. & Price M. (2005)
Developing assessment
literacy - Pre assessment

21. Assessment standards are
difficult
Assessment judgements rely on local,
contextualised interpretations of quality
underpinned by tacit understanding of ‘quality’
shared by members of an assessment community
(Knight, 2006)
A key issue in assessment is that students often do
not understand what is a better piece of work and
do not understand what is being asked of them
particularly in terms of standards and criteria.
(O’Donovan et al., 2001)

22. Active
engagement
with feedback
Explicit
Criteria
Completion andsubmission of
work
Students
Active
engagementwith criteria
Rust C.,O’Donovan B. & Price M. (2005)
Developing assessment
literacy - Assessment
activity

23. Assessment activity
Students must learn to and identify their performance gap for
themselves
‘in the act of production itself’ (Sadler, 1989, p121).
Self assessment
Drafting and redrafting
Peer review
Peer assessment
Peer assisted learning

24. Active
engagement
with feedback
Explicit
Criteria
Completion andsubmission of
work
Students
Active
engagementwith criteria
Rust C.,O’Donovan B. & Price M. (2005)
Developing assessment
literacy: post assessment

25. Beyond the programme:
Assessment literacy and
community
Students
•Self evaluative ability, independent learning and
employability (Boud, 2009)
•Confidence and capability to participate
•Useful evaluation of experience (Price et al 2010)
Staff
•Assessment confidence (Handley et al,2013)
•Acknowledging professional judgement
•Discourse of assessment and feedback dialogue (Price, 2005)

26. Summary
Look beyond the feedback artefact itself.
An overemphasis on technical factors at the expense of
contextual elements such as good teacher student
relationships can be detrimental.
Develop student assessment literacy
Independent learners will cope better with the imprecise
nature of assessment and feedback
Remember: you don’t need to get it all right
all the time