Modelling Feedback and Assessment

During their short time with us students will face almost continuous assessment. While assessment is useful for instructors to examine the progress of the student, the most important aspect of assessment is for students to assess their own practice. A reflective student can examine their study techniques and, with effective constructive feedback, evaluate their writing and studying techniques, improve the quality of future work and gain insight into what level of work is expected of them to attain their desired qualification.

As such, an induction activity was required which would allow for discussion of the power of feedback through assessment, and allow the students to undertake the process of assessing a piece of work.

Method

6 tutors were asked to make a cake to answer the following brief: “Make a chocolate cake to welcome our new students”

Each tutor was given a second (secret) brief for the type of cake they should bring to ensure a spread of quality and to model collusion and plagiarism.

Secret briefs:

- One tutor should make a good quality, simple cake (C)- One tutor should make an excellently presented cake, which tasted horrible (D)- One cake should not be a chocolate cake at all (E)- One cake should be questionably a chocolate cake (chocolate marble?) (F)- One tutor should purchase their cake (B)- One tutor should make two cakes of the same mixture, with different decorations. (A+G)

Students were asked to evaluate the cake, and assign a percentage ‘mark’ for each cake. We asked the students to form groups of 6 and complete the following tasks:

1. List as many criteria as you can think of to judge the cakes. 2. Select the most important criteria and assign weightings.3. Score each cake based on your weighted criteria as a group.

Between each task the groups were asked to share their ideas. We discussed the common themes (taste, texture, presentation) and the less common themes (brownness, emotional reaction to cake, structural integrity of cake).

This is important to foster group bonding and silly answers should always be encouraged while it does not disrupt the point of the discussion.

After the exercise the group submitted their marks for each cake. The marks were collated and a graph showing the average mark and spread of marks was displayed. The tutor then led discussion of the exercise, steering the conversation to make the following points.

- Cakes A and G are the same, despite being superficially different. Collusion is obvious to a tutor who is marking 60 + reports and it would be silly to stake your university career on laziness. You can also discuss how the two cakes generally got the same marks in the same criteria for most of the groups, which is also an indicator of collusion.

- Cake B is purchased. This was interesting as there were no markings on the cake to indicate that it had been purchased, however many students knew as they had bought the exact cake before, making it a perfect model for plagiarism.

- Cakes C and D had different strengths, but substance SHOULD be awarded more marks than style.- Cakes E and F were not, technically, chocolate cakes. However, the students collectively awarded cake F

with the highest marks. This led to discussion of what constitutes a failure. We also discussed what constitutes a bad mark scheme, as in this case cake F also had the widest spread of marks.

Benefits

Overall the activity was well received as a fun activity that 94% of the students rated as ‘useful’ or ‘very useful’ on a Likert scale. The activity allowed groups to bond and discuss the topics as equals, despite the cohort having a wide range of ages and experiences. The students did not feel ‘tested’ as the task appeared to be opinion-based (until we later revealed the secret briefs). There was an element of ‘giving’ from the instructors to the students, which helped improve instructor-student relationships early in the year.

Additionally the activity could be called upon by analogy during tutorials further in the year to explain why a piece of work may not have scored as well as a student hoped, or where there were areas to improve.

The activity also gave the students an appreciation of the workload involved in assessing and giving useful feedback.

Limits

During the activity there was one student who did not like cake. This limited their ability to interact with the activity in any meaningful way during the assessment portion, but the student was able to give input to weightings and criteria early on.

Although we did not observe this, there are students who would find it difficult to marry the analogy of the cake to the real world assessment they would be facing later.

There was a time cost for each of the tutors, and of course, a cost of the ingredients of the cakes.

It is important to consider students who may require or choose a gluten free, or vegan diets.

REFS

Boud, D. (1995b) Enhancing Learning through Self Assessment. London: Kogan Press

Boud, D. (1986) Implementing student self-assessment. Sydney, Australia: Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australia

This activity was designed by Ellen Avery, Katy Dobson, Linda Forbes, Felix Janeway, Stephen Maw, Sheryl Meskin and Emma Pittard at the Lifelong Learning Centre, University of Leeds.