Category Archives: feedback

Feedback and anger

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 … Continue reading

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Conditions under which feedback is useless

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 … Continue reading

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When students don’t understand our feedback

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 … Continue reading

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Positive and negative feedback

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 … Continue reading

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Can online selected response questions really provide useful formative feedback?

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 … Continue reading

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Feedback after a correct answer

OpenMark is set up to give students increasing feedback after each incorrect attempt at a question. After they have had [usually] three attempts they are given a ‘full answer’. The system is set up so that a student who gets … Continue reading

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More on feedback

Picking up on Silvester’s comment on my previous post…I think it is really important that we stop and think before saying that a student answer to an e-assessment question is wrong because some detail of it is wrong. As with … Continue reading

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Learning-oriented and technology-enhanced assessment

My post on ‘Adjectives of assessment’ omitted ‘learning-oriented’, and to be honest it wasn’t until reading this afternoon that I realised what a  powerful concept learning-oriented assessment might be.  I was reading Keppell, M. and Carless, D. (2006) Learning-oriented assessment: a technology-based case study, … Continue reading

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Helpful and unhelpful feedback : a story of sandstone

One of the general findings that is coming out of my evaluation of student responses to multi-try e-assessment questions relates to that wonderful thing that I’ll call the ‘Law of unintended consequences’. I used to think that ‘students don’t read … Continue reading

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Computers as social actors

Some of the findings I’ve been blogging about recently (and some still to come) are contradictory. On the one hand students seem to be very aware that their answers have been marked by a computer not a human-marker, but in … Continue reading

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