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Assessment Feedback using Comment Banks: New Methods

Jeff BrayDr. Miguel moital

School of Services Management

Education Enhancement Conference 2009 Continuing to Enhance the Student ExperienceBournemouth University, 21 May 2009

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Assessment: What’s the Point?

• Enables tutor to ‘Grade’ performance• Distinguish between students• We have to

• Provide feedback and learning opportunity to the students

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Assessment: What’s the Point?

• Formative Assessment

• Summative Assessment

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Role of Assessment Feedback

“It is through feedback of assessment that many of it’s functions are performed”

Nicol et al. 1994

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Role of Assessment Feedback

“…feedback resulted in positive benefits on learning and achievement across all

areas”Black and Wiliam’(1998)

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Reality Check!

• What do our students do with the feedback?• Read it

• Annotate it to gain further understanding• Seek clarification when not clear• Refer back when submitting future work

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Reality Check!

• What do our students do with the feedback?• Throw it

“In my first and second year I never really read the feedback, I was only interested in the mark”

Final Year Retail Student

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Good and Bad Practice

• Good• Focused around positive statements –

provides ideas about what could be improved

• Clearly written in an accessible manner• A depth of individual feedback is provided• Supplemented with in-text annotation• Generates OWNERSHIP of feedback

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Good and Bad Practice

• Bad• Illegible

• Hand written• Written in pencil

• Generic• “doesn’t appear to apply to MY work”

• Unclear – contradictory • Solely negative comments

• Demotivational…

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It’s a tough job!

• How can we most efficiently deliver this high standard of feedback?

• Spend hours doing it?• Not an option & certainly not the answer I set

out to find

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Alternative Approaches

• Generic – tick box approach• Highly time efficient• Provides a high degree of objectivity• Students can clearly see what they need to do

in order to progress• Provides clear justification for the mark

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But…

• Does not generate the ‘ownership’ sought

• Lacks depth and capacity to really articulate the key issues

• Crude

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Comment Banks

• We do find repetition in our comments

• Each comment can be carefully constructed to ensure they outline possible improvement

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Construction

• Based upon previous years’ feedback

• Both general and customised feedback

• Briefly demo the two different methods of construction followed by discussion.• Excel• Waypoint (via MyBU)

• https://mybu.bournemouth.ac.uk/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp

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WayPoint

• My experience - Much more (10 times more & more quality?) feedback using the same time

• Entering data is easy (generating the bank of comments may not)

• Around 6 hours to learn and set up the system (initial investment)

• More enjoyable• Not time saving at the beginning, but as they

experience grew, I became more efficient

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WayPoint

• Basic usage – some benefits not realised (e.g. Send feedback forms via email to students)

• Much of the initial investment is done• Learning how to use the software• Constructing a fairly complete bank of

comments

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Any Questions