Feed-forward: improving students' use of tutor's comments.

Abstract

Anecdotal evidence, considerable practitioner experience, and research within this University (Winter and Dye, 2004) indicate that many students do not collect their work once it has been assessed. Many others show little interest in the written or oral advice offered to them by the markers (Wojtas, 1998). This means that tutors become used to repeating important advice to some students, with no evidence that they have read, understood, or learned from the points raised by them. There are many reasons for students not using tutor feedback. For some students, only the numerical grade is of interest to them – simple, unambiguous and meaningful in terms of achievement and progression (Ecclestone, 1998). Some students will only read the qualitative comments if the quantitative mark is outside their expectations – perhaps to complain if it is surprisingly low, or to bask in the praise of an unexpected A grade. Some students may not read/heed the advice due to a combination of not fully understanding the comments (Chanock, 2000), and not realising their potential value; it is those students that this intervention hoped to target. This study developed from the frustration of tutors who were reduced to pleading that students should engage with their assignment feedback in order to avoid having the same negative remarks appearing on their work in future. One of the student responses to these pleas was that the summative assignments for modules were conclusive and self-contained, and it was difficult to see how comments about raising the grade for a completed module on, say Dyslexia, could help improve grades on the next essay on, say Autism. Indeed, this example uses cognate topic areas, whereas the modular system allows for much more disparate choices of topic, especially in a joint subject degree. Clearly, some students found it difficult to unpick the subject-specific, or topic-content advice from the generic advice to improve future achievement. Developing a solution to this problem required some means of using individual students’ academic histories and applying them to current assessment tasks.