e-assessment (f)or learning

Until this morning, I thought the term ‘feedforward’ was something that had been invented recently – indeed, I thought it had its origins around the time of the FAST (Formative Assessment in Science Teaching) Project and the now famous Gibbs & Simpson (2004-5)literature review which was (I think! – I am now trying to be careful about what I attribute to whom) done as part of the scene setting for the FAST Project. I was certainly wrong about ‘feedforward’ – it turns out that the term was introduced by Mats Bjorkman in 1972 in the following paper:

Bjorkman, M. (1972) Feedforward and feedback as determiners of knowledge and policy: Notes on a neglected issue. Scandinavian Journal of Pyschology, 13, 152-158.

‘Feedforward’ is a useful term in that it makes us remember that we should be looking forwards not backwards. However, as I have argued previously, ‘feedback’ in its use in science and engineering is NOT backward looking. I have shown a picture of our current cold and snowy weather because it is prettier than a picture of my central heating thermostat (please bear with my rather peculiar logic which has led me to show this photo simply because central heating keeps us warm in cold weather). The thermostat uses information about the current temperature, to control the temperature in the future. This is feedback (actually ‘negative feedback’, but let’s not go there!) – a process that uses information.

So I don’t really like the term ‘feedforward’. I don’t think we need it. Let’s just remember that assessment feedback needs to be a process, most significantly a process that involves the student as well as the teacher, not just a flow of information from the teacher to the student. Then it will be forward looking. This is entirely in line with a mass of recent literature that argues in favour of assessment as a dialogic process.

Another JISC-funded project (at the OU Department of Languages and the University of Manchester) looking at student use of feedback. There is more at http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/efep/

The interesting things about this project are (1) that both written and oral feedback will be analysed and (2) the focus on the use of feedback and on staff and student perceptions, as well as on the quality of the feedback itself. I await further findings from this project with considerable interest.

The other thing that was discussed at yesterday’s ‘Analysing feedback’ session at the JISC online conference ‘Innovating e-Learning: shaping the future’ was the role of praise in feedback. (more…)

I’m participating in the ‘activity week’ of the JISC online conference ‘Innovating e-Learning: shaping the future’ and yesterday I caught just 30 minutes of an incredibly interesting session on ‘Analysing feedback’. I have just watched the recording of the rest of it, but wish I’d been able to participate fully. (more…)

This is not new, but it is something we  seem slow to understand, so I’m going to say it again. Just giving feedback is not the same as students acting on or learning from that feedback. And perhaps the point that we find the most difficult to understand: just giving more feedback or feedback that we think is better will not necessarily help.

We are also a bit to ready to blame our students – if they can’t be bothered even to collect their marked work, then it’s their fault isn’t it? Maybe not. Perhaps they think (or know) that it won’t be useful. When students read the feedback but don’t act on it, perhaps they don’t understand it or perhaps they can’t see its relevance to future assignments.

So we need to find out what is going on. We need to talk to our students and monitor their behaviour – and act on what we discover – rather than assuming that we know best. Then we need to work with our students to help them to learn from assessment and feedback and to help us to do better in the future.

This rant (which is really a plea for honest evaluation, and acting on the findings of this) is directed at myself as much as anyone else. We (the teachers) need to collect real feedback as much as anyone else ; this will include monitoring what our students do as well as what they say. Then we need to learn from it .

My previous two posts have identified two conditions which lead to feedback being less than useful:

1. when the recipient doesn’t understand the feedback;

2. when there is a lack of alignment between what is said and information received from another source.

Both previous posts include an aspect of another condition, namely a strong emotional reaction. How well do you receive feedback when you’re angry? To be honest, I’m not sure. Anger makes you remember the incident and I have already posted on the effectiveness of feedback when an answer that you were sure was correct turns out to be incorrect. But anger can prevent you from understanding what was really wrong and make it more likely that you will blame the deliver of the feedback (whether human or computer) rather than actually learning from the feedback received.

Reflecting on the previous post, where a feedback intervention was not understood by a student, I really wonder how useful much of our feedback is. And some of the theory (especially frequently referenced lists of conditions under which feedback supports learning) may just be a load of twaddle. Who am I to say?

So let’s start from the opposite end. Let me start to produce a list of conditions under which feedback is useless. One such condition is that the mark awarded (or other outcome)  is not consistent with the feedback given. This happens when a student scores poorly but the feedback (in an attempt to be supportive) says ‘this was a good attempt’. Clearly not true. (more…)

One of the consequences of my ‘day job’ is that I tend to hear more from students who are disastified in some way with what we do, than from those who are happy. An associate lecturer on one of the modules that I chair had a rather grotty end to 2011 when a student complained about her grading of an assignment – why had she lost all those marks? Incidentally the student got 80+%;  in my experience it is students who are doing very well but who want to be perfect who tend to be most disatisfied – I’m not sure if their disastifaction is more with themselves or with us.

It turns out that the student is not a native speaker of English and she’s convinced that she was penalised because of her poor written English. Not true! (though it might have been – this may not be terribly politically correct, but we’re a UK University and if a student’s written communication skills are not up to par, then they will lose marks). The tutor had given feedback on what might have been done to produce an even better piece of work, but the student doesn’t appear to have understood this. From the student’s point of view, she clearly had some legitimate cause for complaint – and that matters. However, if she would just look at what her tutor has written, understand it, and learn from it, all would be well. But there is a gap between what has been written and what the student understands. Could we have written it more clearly – I don’t know. Hey ho!

Happy New Year everyone.

Time to take a seasonal break from my rather tedious recent posts and to return to a reflection on feedback.

The column ‘Feedback’ (what else!) on the penultimate page of the Christmas and New Year New Scientist special (24/31 December 2011), includes the following:

‘John …recalls a senior manager urging staff to provide feedback for his latest project, ‘but it must be positive’…

John could not help but explain that negative feedback produced growth and stability and positive feedback produced burnout’

John is clearly a man after my own heart! Not only do scientists and senior managers use the adjectives ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ in this context to mean rather different things; those working in assessment are completely confused. The problem is that the impact of assessment feedback may be positive or negative (in both senses of both definitions) and the outcome is difficult to predict.

Happy Christmas and very best wishes for 2012.

The title of this post comes from the title of a thoughtful paper from John Dermo and Liz Carpenter at CAA 2011. In his presentation, John asked whether automated e-feedback can create ‘moments of contingency?’ (Black & Wiliam 2009). This is something I’ve reflected on a lot – it some senses the ideas seem worlds apart. (more…)