HEA accreditation get-togethers… A3

Today we talked about Area of Activity 3: Assess and give feedback to learners.

Suggested as evidence for the portfolios was at Fellow Level:

• Anonymised assessment feedback
• Evaluation of the impact of assessment feedback
• Formative or summative assessment brief

at Senior Fellow Level:

• Evidence of co-ordination toles in relation to student feedback, for example standardisation and moderation

When discussing what examples we could include into our individual portfolios, we were thinking not just about the written feedback the students get, but about the whole experience and how that is structured. For example, one of us explained the feedback procedure in her award area and how the students are provided with written feedback as preparation for a tutorial, which allows them time before the tutorial to reflect and actually prepare for the tutorial, so they can come up with specific questions they have. This is something that wouldn’t necessarily be apparent from the suggested examples, so we thought that it might be a good idea to put together a flow-chart of how the feedback process works – and how it is effectively turned into feed-forward.

We were talking about how to visually present the feedback to students, and I particularly mentioned a paper on this I heard at a conference in 2010 (which I highly recommend and can be found here), which I have based my current feedback sheets on.

We were then also thinking about ways to visually explain to students the weighting of different aspects, whether they be different parts of the module or different learning outcomes, as this is a problem that students often seem to have, not quite understanding that not every part is of equal importance when it comes to coming up with the final grade. We thought that it might be a nice idea to include a pie chart to show this to students.