Designing Effective Feedback Processes in Higher Education

A Learning-Focused Approach

Naomi Winstone, David Carless

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780815361633
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351115926
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Feedback is one of the most powerful influences on student achievement, yet it is difficult to implement productively within the constraints of a mass higher education system. Designing Effective Feedback Processes in Higher Education: A Learning-Focused Approach addresses the challenges of developing effective feedback processes in higher education, combining theory and practice to equip and empower educators. It places less emphasis on what teachers do in terms of providing commentary, and more emphasis on how students generate, make sense of, and use feedback for ongoing improvement.

Including discussions on promoting student engagement with feedback, technology-enabled feedback, and effective peer feedback, this book:

• Contributes to the theory and practice of feedback in higher education by showcasing new paradigm feedback thinking focused on dialogue and student uptake
• Synthesises the evidence for effective feedback practice
• Provides contextualised examples of successful innovative feedback designs analysed in relation to relevant literature
• Highlights the importance of staff and student feedback literacy in developing productive feedback partnerships
• Supports higher education teachers in further developing their feedback practice.

Designing Effective Feedback Processes in Higher Education: A Learning-Focused Approach contributes to the theory and practice of higher education pedagogy by re-evaluating how feedback processes are designed and managed. It is a must-read for educators, researchers, and academic developers in higher education who will benefit from a guide to feedback research and practice that addresses well recognised challenges in relation to assessment and feedback.

Chapter 1

The feedback challenge

Many articles on assessment feedback in higher education open by posing a commonly experienced dilemma: we know that high-quality feedback has the potential to have one of the strongest influences on students’ achievement (e.g. Hattie, & Timperley, 2007), yet feedback is often framed as the dimension of students’ experience with which they are least satisfied. In addition, despite recognising the value of feedback, and commonly voicing dissatisfaction with the quality and quantity of feedback received, students often appear to make limited use of feedback. This conundrum has occupied the minds of teachers who often express frustration as the effort they expend in the provision of feedback is perceived to be wasted when students do not appear to engage with the advice. However, whilst there is a wealth of research evidence regarding perceptions of feedback and how it might be delivered, there are comparatively few studies of how students use feedback. This is problematic as the simple act of delivering feedback is limited in its effectiveness, as argued by Royce Sadler: “Learners do not always learn much purely from being told, even when they are told repeatedly in the kindest possible way” (Sadler, 2015, p. 16).

In recent years, the literature on student engagement with feedback has experienced significant development; researchers are exhibiting a growing interest in how and why students engage with assessment feedback, how best to design assessment and feedback to facilitate engagement, and how to measure the impact of feedback (Henderson, Ajjawi, Boud, & Molloy, 2019). Feedback is being reframed from something that teachers do, to a process where students are involved in seeking, processing, and using feedback information. As neatly argued by Sadler (2010), feedback as ‘telling’ is not effective in facilitating learning because the connection between feedback comments, students’ work, and future learning relies on clear and unambiguous interpretation of those comments, and in many cases key messages remain invisible to students. In this book, we look beyond feedback as the transmission of comments towards an approach where teachers design feedback sequences in ways that enable students to construct and implement their own understandings on the basis of feedback exchanges. In order for assessment and performance feedback to facilitate long-term learning and skill development, the feedback receiver needs to be open to hearing the advice of the feedback-giver, to remember how they have been advised to develop their skills, and to take advantage of opportunities to use the comments they have received. Feedback can, however, sometimes be difficult to comprehend, difficult to remember, and putting feedback into practice requires time and effort.

Discussions around feedback are often fraught with tensions and dilemmas, where “Feedback is a complex notion, often embedded in a common-sense and simplistic dominant discourse” (Askew, & Lodge, 2000, p. 1). Furthermore, whilst many guidelines for effective feedback have been published (e.g. Evans, 2013; Nicol, & Macfarlane-Dick, 2006), the translation of such guidance into practice is by no means straightforward (Barton, Schofield, McAleer, & Ajjawi, 2016). In this chapter, we first discuss different approaches to conceptualising feedback and set out the key features of old and new paradigms of feedback. We relate these to the social-constructivist approach which frames our thinking around feedback. We then move from dominant sources in the literature to the voices of higher education practitioners, to explore some of the common challenges experienced in the assessment and feedback process, and perceived barriers to reforming feedback processes, drawing upon data from the Feedback Cultures project. We conclude the chapter by considering how to move beyond a transmission-focused approach to feedback.

Defining and conceptualising feedback

One of the key challenges inherent in managing feedback in higher education is that there is much debate over what the term actually means. The term itself is broad, and has been used in widely differing ways, by different stakeholders, in different contexts. A conventional view is to see feedback as information provided by an agent, for example, a teacher, peer or self, about aspects of performance or understanding (Hattie, & Timperley, 2007). This is how feedback is commonly interpreted by teachers and students. Whilst students do need information about their performance in order to improve, this is insufficient for the implementation of effective feedback processes because students also need motivation and opportunities to make sense of comments and to use them to for improvement purposes.

Accordingly, in the recent literature on feedback in higher education (e.g. Boud, & Molloy, 2013; Carless, & Boud, 2018; Sadler, 2010; Winstone, Nash, Parker, & Rowntree, 2017a), greater focus has been placed on students’ actions in response to performance information from teachers, peers and their own self-evaluation. For information to lead to action, students need opportunities to apply feedback to future tasks in order to inform the development of their learning. Building on this line of thinking, feedback is conceptualised as a process whereby students are proactive in seeking, making sense of, and using comments on their performance or their approaches to learning. This emphasis on sense-making and future actions resonates with the new paradigm feedback practices that are the focus of this book. A fundamental dimension of this conceptualisation is that a feedback process is not solely characterised by the input of comments but also by the impact in terms of changes to students’ behaviour, motivation or learning strategies.

Consider the well-known philosophical thought experiment, which poses the question that if a tree falls in the forest, and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound? In parallel, if feedback is simply ‘delivered’, without leading to student uptake and impact on learning, is it merely information that leaves no trace? Sadler (1989, p. 121) aptly described information that is not used as “dangling data”, which reflects the roots of the concept of feedback in cybernetic systems theory. In line with a cybernetic orientation, Wiener (1968) articulated the importance of feedback information leading to some change in output:

Feedback is a method of controlling a system by reinserting into it the results of its past performance. If these results are merely used as numerical data for the criticism of the system and its regulation, we have the simple feedback of the control engineers. If, however, the information which proceeds backwards from the performance is able to change the general method and patterns of performance, we have a process which may well be called learning.

(Wiener, 1968, p. 56)

The ‘system’ of feedback processes in higher education, characterised by the cognitions, emotions, and behaviours of human agents, add further layers of complexity to this process. However, the fundamental principle of a changed output in response to feedback remains of central importance. It is this response on the part of the student that characterises new paradigm approaches to feedback in higher education.

Old and new feedback paradigms

Thus far, we have outlined two different ways of thinking about feedback in higher education. The first is more focused on inputs: the provision of information or comments to students. The second is more focused on interaction, student sense-making and outputs in terms of future student action. The first more conventional view of feedback is seen as representing an old paradigm, whereas the second is termed new paradigm (Carless, 2015a). We are using the term ‘paradigm’ somewhat informally to represent ways of thinking about feedback. In our workshops with teachers, they seem to find it helpful to distinguish between transmission-focused old paradigm approaches mainly focused on teachers providing information and new paradigm practices adopting a more learning-focused orientation. Of course, it is more complex than that distinction implies because there is generally an interplay between inputs and outputs. The output from a system is dependent on the nature and quality of the input, so the comments that students receive on their work or learning are an important prerequisite for the impact of feedback processes. We are not arguing that we need to dispense with the old paradigm altogether, as to a certain extent this is the basis upon which new paradigm approaches can build. The problem occurs when feedback is seen only as comments, with no consideration given to what happens next.

New paradigm practices imply a number of features. Rather than the teacher providing information and the student being positioned somewhat passively, new paradigm feedback approaches aim for more of a partnership between teachers and students. This partnership envisages a key teacher role as designing feedback processes to facilitate students’ participation in elements such as peer feedback and self-evaluation. Implicit in these practices are interactions of different forms but not those that are dominated by teachers; students can initiate feedback processes by actively seeking feedback or identifying where feedback information might help them to improve specific skills. Active student roles in feedback processes require teachers to support students to understand how to engage in productive feedback interactions. This of course raises the issue of how far the responsibility of teachers should extend: students have agency to engage with feedback processes as they wish. However, students are likely to possess greater agency to enact feedback where they have the opportunity to implement feedback on subsequent tasks, and where they feel equipped to take productive action upon feedback. Whilst it is true that you can lead a horse to water but cannot make it drink, you can make it thirsty. It is via the design of learning opportunities through feedback that students’ ‘thirst’ for feedback can be optimised.

The seminal paper by Boud and Molloy (2013) makes the case that feedback needs to be carefully designed and integrated with curriculum and teaching sequences. Building upon this important insight, we show how meaningful and considered assessment and feedback designs can facilitate new paradigm feedback practices. The input of performance information is transformed through principled design features so that students are enabled to engage with and use feedback to facilitate their own learning. This is illustrated in Figure 1.1, whereby we conceptualise the intersection between old and new paradigm approaches as driven by design.

Figure 1.1 Old and new paradigms of feedback

For example, if we want to transform feedback from the provision of information to a sense-making process where students work to develop their own representation of what it means, we need to design opportunities for students to grasp what feedback means for their own learning. Similarly, if we want to position students as active participants in feedback processes whereby they can generate comments for themselves rather than being dependent on the provision of comments from others, then we need to design opportunities for them to engage with standards and criteria to inform judgements about the quality of their own work. The notion of design is fundamental to our conceptual approach to feedback: it is design that provides a pathway for feedback information to lead to student uptake. All of the feedback cases in this book involve carefully designed opportunities for students to implement feedback. We now turn to a consideration of approaches to feedback design presented in the literature.

Facilitating impact through design

Effective feedback is not merely something that happens after assessment has taken place; rather, it is designed into learning processes from the outset. Part of the impetus for a shift towards new paradigm models of feedback is a growing recognition that lack of student engagement with feedback often emanates from assessment designs which inadvertently limit student agency and action in relation to feedback. A key tenet of new paradigm feedback approaches is to promote student action, with the implication that such approaches should aim to reduce unproductive teacher commentary at times when students cannot use it.

Boud and Molloy (2013) advocate a curriculum approach to feedback, where students have the opportunity to develop their judgements of quality, and to engage in giving and receiving feedback through exchanges with peers. Fundamental to a curriculum approach to feedback is the design of multiple, sequential, and nested tasks, where comments on students’ work can be applied to future tasks and learning opportunities. Their description of a curriculum approach clearly demonstrates how the design of feedback opportunities is central to a new paradigm ethos:

Such a view enables feedback to be repositioned away from its taken-for-granted role as a feature of the ways teachers act towards students, towards being seen as an attribute of the curriculum that locates it as a central feature of student engagement. Feedback becomes therefore a key curriculum space for communicating, for knowing, for judging, for acting.

(Boud, & Molloy, 2013, pp. 706–707)

This approach to feedback as a ‘curriculum space’ also resonates with the notion of sustainable feedback, which refers to setting up feedback processes such that feedback enables student action and learning beyond the current task, and develops students’ capacities to use feedback beyond their time at University (Hounsell, 2007). In their analysis of sustainable feedback, Carless, Salter, Yang, and Lam (2011) identify four features of design that facilitate sustainable feedback: opportunities for dialogue to elucidate quality; opportunities for students to develop the capacity to monitor and evaluate their own learning; opportunities for students to develop goal-setting capacities; and opportunities to apply feedback to multiple iterations of tasks. Whilst some learning environments might incorporate all of these design features, others may not embody any at all. The survey administered as part of the Feedback Cultures project identified that the design of learning tasks to facilitate student implementation of feedback is more common in some contexts than others (Winstone, & Boud, 2019), suggesting that some feedback cultures have a stronger design stance than others.

Feedback cultures

The design of feedback processes takes place within a complex interaction of intrapersonal, interpersonal and contextual influences. Such interaction creates feedback ‘cultures’, which we conceptualise as representing the beliefs, values and practices that typically characterise and influence feedback processes within a given educational setting. Ajjawi, Molloy, Bearman, and Rees (2017) drew upon Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) ecological systems theory to explore contextual influences on students’ experiences of feedback. We follow Ajjawi et al. (2017) in applying this approach to consider the possible construction of feedback cultures that might have an impact on an individual’s or a team’s pedagogic decision-making in the area of assessment and feedback. Design does not take place in a vacuum: it is influenced by a range of contextual, disciplinary, and ecological factors.

An ecological systems approach would vi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of boxes
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Series editors’ introduction
• Introduction
• 1. The feedback challenge
• 2. Developing student feedback literacy
• 3. Facilitating student engagement with feedback processes
• 4. Technology-enabled feedback processes
• 5. Enabling feedback through assessment design
• 6. Enabling dialogue in feedback processes
• 7. Interweaving internal and external feedback
• 8. Implementing peer feedback
• 9. The relational dimension of feedback
• 10. Moving feedback forwards
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index