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So Malecka, Boud and Carless, talk about three different ways of embedding the development of students’ feedback literacy. These core skills and capacities for using feedback effectively into the curriculum. One of these is the use of interactive cover sheets. Now, when students submit work they complete this cover sheet which has spaces for them to document perhaps how they’ve used feedback from the prior assessment to inform that piece of work but most importantly, they can ask the marker for feedback on specific elements of their work. So it’s encouraging students to engage in feedback seeking behavior. To think about what their goals and their priorities for improvements are and to actually ask the feedback giver to direct their comments towards those goals and strategies.
Second strategy they talk about is engaging students in peer review and response activities. Now, these activities are really useful because as well as students generating feedback for each other, it helps students to take the perspective of a marker to better understand standards and criteria which can help them in interpreting their own feedback they get on their work. But also by reading the work of a peer, the students are able to engage in comparison processes where they can think about how their own work differs to that of a peer. And David Nicol writes that these comparison processes can be a really powerful source of internal feedback.
Finally, they talk about the potential for students to curate feedback through e-portfolios. So that feedback is not just something that they get on one piece of work at one point in time, but that they can start to chart their development over time by looking at the patterns that they might be getting in feedback, comments from different markers and different types of tasks. And this can really help students to engage in action planning, think about what their priorities for improvements are and work out how they’re going to enact that.
In a recent paper, Malecka et al. (2020) described activities that can be used to develop students’ ‘feedback literacy’.
Winstone and Nash authored a toolkit of resources for educators to use with their students to help develop the skills underpinning the use of feedback (Nash & Winstone, 2016). It contains a student-authored guide to using feedback, a set of activities and resources that can be used in class time to develop the skills underpinning the use of feedback, and the building blocks for a feedback portfolio that encourages students to synthesise multiple pieces of feedback to inform action.
We can also take actions to bring the student voice into feedback:
- We can adopt dialogic approaches to feedback where we talk to students about their work and give them opportunities to ask questions that inform their use of comments.
- We can invite students to request feedback on specific elements of their work, using interactive cover sheets (Bloxham & Campbell, 2010).
- We can build students’ use of feedback into assessment processes, by rewarding students’ engagement (Man et al., 2020).
References:
Bloxham, S. & Campbell, L. (2010). Generating dialogue in assessment feedback: exploring the use of interactive cover sheets. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 35(3), 291-300.
Malecka, B., Boud, D. & Carless, D. (2020). Eliciting, processing and enacting feedback: mechanisms for embedding student feedback literacy within the curriculum. Teaching in Higher Education.
Man, D., Chau, M. H. & Kong, B. (2020). Promoting student engagement with teacher feedback through rebuttal writing. Educational Psychology.
Nash, R. A. & Winstone, N. E. (2016). The Developing Engagement with Feedback Toolkit (DEFT). Advanced HE. [Online].
Discussions
Do you have any practical tips or activities to share in relation to supporting students' use of feedback?
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