TDG – Too Little, Too Late: Exploring the Feedback Conundrum

Abstract

This project explored staff and student perspectives on feedback to undergraduate students. It involved interviews with 10 award-winning teachers in the university; focus group interviews with students; and developmental work with selected colleagues. A key finding is that one-way transmissional feedback is severely limited, although it is prevalent because of constraints implicit within modularized higher education in research-intensive settings.

Through the project, the notion of sustainable feedback has been developed. Sustainable feedback is defined as dialogic processes and activities which can support and inform the student on the current task, whilst also developing the ability to self-regulate performance on future tasks.

Sustainable feedback encompasses the following characteristics:

• Involving students in dialogues about learning which raise their awareness of quality performance;
• Facilitating feedback processes through which students are stimulated to develop capacities in monitoring and evaluating their own learning;
• Enhancing student capacities for ongoing lifelong learning by supporting student development of skills for goal-setting and planning their learning.
• Assessment task design which facilitates engagement over time in which feedback from varied sources is generated, processed and used to enhance performance on multiple stages of assignments.

Deliverables