We had a wonderful session at an OU staff development meeting in Cambridge yesterday, discussing ‘Time well spent? Making the most of correspondence tuition’. Follow the links below for a copy of the handout on ‘theory’ and for a summary of our discussions. (more…)
Returning to Lipnevich and Smith’s interesting work (Lipnevich, A.A. & Smith, J.K. (2009) “I really need feedback to learn:” students’ perspectives of the differential feedback messages, Educational Assessment Evaluation & Accountability, 21, 347-367). And for the benefit of those who attended the session that Lesley and I ran at yesterday’s OU associate lecturer staff development meeting in Cambridge, yes that is how the punctuation is given in the title! And yes, I know that the first sentence in this paragraph isn’t a sentence at all, and the second and third both begin with ‘And’. 
Lipnevich and Smith explored the way in which students react to feedback and one of their variables was whether the students believed the feedback (and in some instances the grade) to come from a computer or a human marker. (more…)
This is another of those ideas that others probably thought of years ago, but I’ve been a bit slow on the uptake. In summary, findings about the effectiveness or otherwise of feedback probably depend on what the feedback is meant to be used for. The usual OU scenario is a student receiving feedback on a tutor-marked assignment and (supposedly) using this feedback to improve for next time. But in other contexts, the feedback may be intended to enable the student to improve the same piece of work. And the ‘three attempts with increasing feedback’ that we provide on interactive computer-marked assignments perhaps has more in common with the second of these than the first. (more…)
At the UK Open University, the distinction between the formative and summative functions of assessment has always been blurred. This is because our tutor-marked assignments (TMAs) and computer-marked assignments (old-fashioned CMAs or modern iCMAs) frequently count towards a student’s overall continuous assessment score. But yet tutors spend a huge amount of time writing comments on their students’ TMAs and we refer to the process as ‘correspondence tuition’ – a clear indication of the importance that we place on the formative potential of TMAs. In our distance-learning environment, where opportunities for face-to-face contact with students are extremely limited, the personalised teaching that takes place in correspondence tuition becomes extremely important. (more…)
Listening to Patricia Cartney from Middlesex University speak at the Centre for Distance Education Conference last week made me think about peer assessment. Apologies to those who have been working in this area for year, my thoughts are probably terribly naive.
Students comment on other students’ work and benefit is claimed both from the fact that students are receiving feedback from others and from the fact that they are giving feedback to others. I wonder which of these is more significant? I asked the question and Patricia said she thinks it is the latter; that seems likely, but is has deep implications. To my mind it is yet more evidence that we (teachers) are waiting a lot of time in giving feedback that students don’t even understand, let alone use. As one of Patricia’s students said, the peer assessment process ‘wasn’t just about giving feedback to other people it was also whilst I was giving the feedback I was questioning my own work and learning from other peoples’ styles’.