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Dialogic feedback and potentialities for student learning
Abstract
Dialogic approaches to feedback have been highlighted as important in re-conceptualizing the notion of feedback in higher education. However, this kind of claims has rarely been explored conceptually, and we know little about how dialogic feedback takes place when learners engage in feedback practices. The object of this study is two-fold; first we derive four dialogic dimensions from dialogic theory, and second we use these dimensions as an analytical framework to investigate feedback dialogues between a teacher and his students. For the purpose of in-depth investigation of the learning potential in dialogic feedback, we use interaction analysis. Based on the four theoretical dimensions merged with findings from our empirical case, we suggest an analytical model for the purpose of conceptualizing the distinctive features of dialogic feedback. The model holds four potentialities for student learning from dialogic feedback, which are; (a) emotional and relational support, (b) maintenance of the feedback dialogue, (c) opportunities for students to express themselves, and (d) the other's contribution to individual growth. We propose this model as an analytical tool for researchers in further investigation of learning potential in dialogic feedback in higher education contexts.
... To make learning through feedback more interactive and meaningful to the user, some studies have developed and investigated other feedback approaches, such as the dialogic feedback method [27,28,86,114,116]. Dialogic feedback refers to learning about and from feedback through dialogue by actively involving learners in the sense-making and interpreting of the provided feedback [114]. ...
... To make learning through feedback more interactive and meaningful to the user, some studies have developed and investigated other feedback approaches, such as the dialogic feedback method [27,28,86,114,116]. Dialogic feedback refers to learning about and from feedback through dialogue by actively involving learners in the sense-making and interpreting of the provided feedback [114]. Dialogic feedback incorporates two-way interaction in the feedback process [28] where the learner is not a mere recipient of feedback but an active participant who intentionally seeks feedback for learning by engaging in dialogue with the feedback provider [19]. ...
... Several studies have focused on conceptualizing and exploring dialogic feedback [27,28,86,114,116]. Based on Steen et al. [114], dialogic feedback refers to learning about and from feedback through dialogue, involving learners in actively interpreting and making meaning from the feedback. ...
Job interviews play a critical role in shaping one's career, yet practicing interview skills can be challenging, especially without access to human coaches or peers for feedback. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) present an opportunity to enhance the interview practice experience. Yet, little research has explored the effectiveness and user perceptions of such systems or the benefits and challenges of using LLMs for interview practice. Furthermore, while prior work and recent commercial tools have demonstrated the potential of AI to assist with interview practice, they often deliver one-way feedback, where users only receive information about their performance. By contrast, dialogic feedback, a concept developed in learning sciences, is a two-way interaction feedback process that allows users to further engage with and learn from the provided feedback through interactive dialogue. This paper introduces Conversate, a web-based application that supports reflective learning in job interview practice by leveraging large language models (LLMs) for interactive interview simulations and dialogic feedback. To start the interview session, the user provides the title of a job position (e.g., entry-level software engineer) in the system. Then, our system will initialize the LLM agent to start the interview simulation by asking the user an opening interview question and following up with questions carefully adapted to subsequent user responses. After the interview session, our back-end LLM framework will then analyze the user's responses and highlight areas for improvement. Users can then annotate the transcript by selecting specific sections and writing self-reflections. Finally, the user can interact with the system for dialogic feedback, conversing with the LLM agent to learn from and iteratively refine their answers based on the agent's guidance.
... Based on the analysis of data collected within a semester, we derive a set of recommendations to address the gap of LA lacking alignment with dialogic feedback principles. The significance of this study lies in the exploration of an authentic dialogic feedback practice at scale as opposed to existing studies (Jones et al., 2018;Jones et al., 2021;Rovagnati & Pitt, 2022;Steen-Utheim & Wittek, 2017;Tam, 2021;Tan et al., 2019Tan et al., , 2020) that used smaller samples. Specifically, this study focuses on understanding students' needs for feedback, educators' responses to the needs through personalised feedback, and students' experience with the provided feedback. ...
... Dialogue generally refers to a discussion between a group of two or more. However, the term dialogic does not refer to this general idea but to how we formulate and understand the information in both written and oral forms (Steen-Utheim & Wittek, 2017). Similarly, the concept of dialogic feedback refers to a dialogue between educators and students about feedback beyond its' initial occurrence to enhance learning (Filius et al., 2018). ...
... This finding indicates that students expect both cognitive and socialaffective elements, especially affirmation from their educators in the feedback. This need for affirmation aligns with the relational aspect of dialogic feedback (Steen-Utheim & Wittek, 2017). In addition, the need for highlighting strengths and weaknesses aligns with the students' sense-making of feedback elaborated in the student-centred feedback framework by Ryan et al. (2021). ...
Background
Feedback is central to formative assessments but aligns with a one‐way information transmission perspective obstructing students' effective engagement with feedback. Previous research has shown that a responsive, dialogic feedback process that requires educators and students to engage in ongoing conversations can encourage student active engagement in feedback. However, it is challenging with larger student cohorts. Learning Analytics (LA) provides promising ways to facilitate timely feedback at scale by leveraging large datasets generated during students' learning. However, current LA design and implementation tend to treat feedback as a one‐way transmission rather than a two‐way process.
Objectives
This case study aims to improve LA design and practice to align with dialogic feedback principles by exploring an authentic dialogic feedback practice at scale.
Methods
We explored a dialogic feedback practice of a course having 700 undergraduate students. The case study used quantitative and qualitative analysis methods to investigate what students expect from feedback, how educators respond to students' feedback requests, and how students experience feedback.
Results and Conclusions
The results emphasise the need to focus on cognitive, relational and emotional aspects of the feedback process. In aligning LA with dialogic feedback principles, we propose that LA should promote the following objectives: reflection, adaption, personalisation, emotional management, and scaffolding feedback provision.
... Dialogic approaches to feedback have been hailed as crucial for fostering student learning in higher education (Steen-Utheim & Wittek, 2017), as they facilitate negotiations of meaning in feedback interactions (Q. Zhu & Carless, 2018). ...
... This study delved into the roles assumed by students with diverse translation proficiency levels within peer feedback triads, examining the influence of peer scaffolding and learning elements on their role performance. The innovative design of peer feedback groups, accommodating students with varying translation proficiency and offering role flexibility, alongside the identification of distinct feedback roles (receiver, observer, giver, summariser, and coordinator) not only resonates with the imperative to establish mechanisms fostering a more student-centred approach (Molloy et al., 2020) but also furnishes empirical evidence of student contributions in dialogic peer feedback (Steen-Utheim & Wittek, 2017). Firstly, the present study shows that students perceive roles differently before and after feedback sessions. ...
... Low-proficiency students responded promptly to their givers' feedback, valuing immediate responses in feedback interactions (Excerpt 7). While these minimal responses may seem less insightful, they are inherently essential in dialogic feedback (Steen-Utheim & Wittek, 2017), because theses attempts ensure necessary maintenance of feedback dialogues and prepare the grounds for further interactions and mutual learning (Vygotsky, 1978). ...
... Dialogic feedback has four dimensions: "emotional and relational support; maintenance of the feedback dialogue; opportunities for students to express themselves; and contribution to individual growth" (Steen-Utheim & Wittek, 2017, p. 18). [40] It is, at its essence, a conversation between the student and the teacher and can provide error correction, exemplars and explanation of responses' relative consequences and appropriateness (Carless & Chan, 2017). [8] Feedback improves learning (Carless & Winstone, 2020) [10] and is considered the most critical factor in learning design (Boud & Molloy, 2013, [4] Hattie & Timperley, 2007). ...
... T h i s d i a l o g i c f e e d b a c k a l l o w e d s t u d e n t s t o communicate with the teacher to help clarify concepts and co-construct meaning (Steen-Utheim & Wittek, 2017). [40] We did not discuss questions that most students answered correctly, as we assumed most students understood the concept. The teachers would discuss questions where students had trouble, and then students were encouraged to query their scores, which led to further discussion of the low-stakes online tests and the answers (Ingram & Nelson, 2006). ...
... Student reflections in the survey showed evidence that they thought the low-stakes tests contributed to their learning, reinforcing Nicol's (2007) [30] argument that low-stakes tests can contribute to learning. While the evidence in our results was not conclusive about the role of immediate dialogic feedback, when we consider the strength of the literature supporting dialogic feedback, we are confident of its contribution to learning (Carless & Chan, 2017; [8] Steen-Utheim & Wittek, 2017; [40] Willis et al., 2021; [49] Yang & Carless, 2013). [51] ...
The engagement of students is a recognised challenge for teachers. Technology offers some practical student engagement tools, and this paper examines the use of low-stakes online tests and immediate dialogic feedback to improve behavioural engagement. The academic exploration of low-stakes tests and dialogic feedback has been extensive, and they are credible teaching tools. In this study, we explore the learning benefit of their combination. Postgraduate engineering students' self-reported and learning analytics data shows conclusive evidence of improved behavioural engagement. We measured a 500% increase in the Learning Management System (LMS) page views on the days when we ran the low-stakes tests (each worth 2% of the marks for the subject) and engaged in immediate dialogic feedback. To interpret these results, we draw on theories of behavioural engagement, low-stakes tests, and feedback. We conclude that the combination of low-stakes tests and immediate feedback improves student behavioural engagement.
... According to Bakhtin (1994), the dialogic utterances of speakers are the outcome of their interaction in particular social situations or contexts, which implies that duologues include the relationships constructed and negotiated by speakers (Yang & Carless, 2013). Within the sociocultural view (Vygotsky, 1978), as learners engage in dialogue or interaction, they negotiate meanings and develop their cognitive skills, such as critical thinking (Steen-Utheim & Wittek, 2017). Dialogic feedback plays an important role in fostering learners' roles as active respondents to feedback (Blair & McGinty, 2013;Espasa et al. , 2018;Guasch et al., 2019;Saeed & Al Qunayeer, 2020). ...
... The current study used an interaction analysis which is an interdisciplinary approach to analyzing and understanding dialogues or interactions (Ajjawi & Boud, 2017. This approach was selected because of its view of knowledge and actions as basically embedded in social and material contexts (Ajjawi & Boud, 2017Steen-Utheim & Wittek, 2017). Therefore, it enabled the researchers to better understand what was taking place in these dialogues and how meaning and its implication were constructed in such dialogues (Ajjawi & Boud, 2018). ...
... Learners' success in acting upon the received feedback depends significantly on their understanding of feedback(Guasch et al., 2019;Winstone et al., 2017) and other factors such as the nature of feedback and types of issues detected or addressed in learners' texts(Saeed & Al Qunayeer, 2020). Therefore, this dialogic approach to feedback emphasizes interactions as the central element in the process of feedback(Blair & McGinty, 2013; Carless, 2006 Carless, , 2020a Guasch et al., 2019;Saeed & Al Qunayeer, 2020).Despite this argument supporting the efficacy of the dialogic approach to feedback, empirical research on dialogic feedback processes in writing classrooms is still limited(Adie et al., 2018; Guasch et al., 2019;Saeed & Al Qunayeer, 2020) or has not been undertaken significantly so far(Dann, 2015; Green, 2019;Steen- Utheim & Wittek, 2017) ...
We are very happy to publish this issue of the International Journal of Learning, Teaching and Educational Research. The International Journal of Learning, Teaching and Educational Research is a peer-reviewed open-access journal committed to publishing high-quality articles in the field of education. Submissions may include full-length articles, case studies and innovative solutions to problems faced by students, educators and directors of educational organisations.
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We seize this opportunity to thank them for their great collaboration. The Editorial Board is composed of renowned people from across the world. Each paper is reviewed by at least two blind reviewers.
We will endeavour to ensure the reputation and quality of this journal with this issue.
... This active interaction between teacher and student is likely to be maximised in case of both formative and iterative assessments. Such interactive opportunities assist both teachers and students to eliminate any misunderstandings regarding the intended feedback (Steen-Utheim & Wittek, 2017). ...
... In contrast, the process approach discarded the scope of memorisation and made the students consciously experience the various stages of writing (pre, during, and post) and reshape and improve their writing continuously based on the feedback received upon each stage of their writings. The emphasis on providing repetitive feedback by teachers and the ongoing proceduralisation of academic writing styles by students are precisely what the tutorial-based DF accomplishes in EAP writing courses, leading to the effective development of students' academic writing (Steen-Utheim & Wittek, 2017). The excerpt from the interview with Participant D conveys the very point below: ...
This study explores undergraduate students’ perspectives of experiencing tutorial-based dialogic feedback (DF) aimed at enhancing their academic writing skills required for successful completion of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) writing courses. To achieve this aim, an interview-based qualitative study was conducted in a renowned institution of higher education in Bangladesh. The generated data were analysed using an inductive thematic analysis approach, which yielded the findings of this study. The key findings suggest that DF has possible significant prospects to be employed in EAP writing courses working alongside written corrective feedback (WCF). DF helps students better comprehend and effectively apply WCF in both the revised and final drafts of their assignments, potentially resulting in enhanced academic writing. The successful implementation of the DF framework, as proposed by Yang and Carless (2013), may ultimately lead to improvements in academic writing skills. Consequently, this study contributes South Asian evidence-based research to the existing body of knowledge on the pedagogical use of DF.
... La retroalimentación como diálogo está constituida de interacciones verbales y no verbales entre los sujetos y con los artefactos como sustrato para la participación del profesor y estudiantes (Steen-Utheim y Wittek, 2017;Sutton, 2012). De este modo, la naturaleza de la retroalimentación es interactiva por cuanto asume la agencia de los sujetos para interpretar, dar sentido y actuar sobre el conocimiento y, a su vez, actúa como un andamiaje para el desarrollo de los aprendizajes en el cual las deliberaciones del profesor y estudiantes son relevantes para su co-construcción (Black y Wiliam, 2018;Lam, 2017). ...
... Los hallazgos indican que existe convergencia entre profesores principiantes y expertos en los criterios evaluativos que organizan la retroalimentación. Estos son: el contenido, el desempeño transversal del aprendizaje y la contextualización del desempeño que se asocian con una retroalimentación de tipo evaluativa y descriptiva (Steen-Utheim y Wittek, 2017;Tunstall y Gipss, 1996). Así, los profesores que conciben la retroalimentación como correctiva/retroactiva, despliegan prácticas de tipo evaluativo y aquellos que la entienden como orientativa/proyectiva realizan una retroalimentación de tipo descriptiva. ...
The purpose of this article is to analyze teacher feedback in the development of social thought in secondary education. Twelve teachers of History, Geography and Social Sciences participated according to teaching experience, type of school establishment and gender. Two individual interviews were conducted with each teacher with a thematic pattern. The interviews were coded with a qualitative content analysis deductively. The results indicate that they conceive the feedback as corrective/retroactive and orientative/projective and its implementation is of an evaluative and descriptive type focused on the skills of inquiry, temporality, contextualization and multi-causality with the use of evaluative instruments, questions and examples with little dialogic feedback. In conclusion, the feedback on social thinking made by teachers hinders the construction of complex knowledge and the active participation of students, which requires an improvement in feedback literacy in school education.
... This rather unidirectional vision, where the student only receives information, is overcome by dialogic feedback (Carless, 2006), understood as the dialogue between the agents involved in the learning process. This model has potentialities (Utheim-Steen & Wittek, 2017) such as emotional and relational support, opportunities for students to express themselves, and the contribution of the other to individual growth. Finally, at present, feedback can be understood as the 'process by which learners make sense of the information they receive from different sources and use it to improve their work and/or learning strategies' (Carless & Boud, 2018, p. 3). ...
Research on peer feedback has proven that it enhancess learning by fostering student agency and providing a deeper understanding of assessment criteria and greater capacity for self-reflection, which become key strategies for self-regulated learning. However, peer feedback does not seem to have been systematically involved in teacher training processes, especially in ongoing training. The previous literature on this topic reports both the scarcity of practices and the difficulties in their implementation. The absence of institutional support, the lack of training (which affects the quality of feedback) or the existence of non-peer relationships nor collaborative processes are some of the problems highlighted. The results show that peer feedback practices have benefits for the improvement of teachers’ competencies but that these practices must be developed in teacher collaboration settings, within safe environments. As a conclusion, a decalogue of proposals is drawn up for the design of peer feedback experiences in ongoing training processes and teacher professional development.
... In particular, DeKleijn ( 2023) states that discourse feedback has an important role in student response feedback. It has been shown that the discourse feedback (sharing explanations, negotiating in interactive exchanges) that students engage in with others in response to feedback can better help them understand, process, and use the feedback information, and in turn, acquire new feedback information (Steen-Utheima & Wittek, 2017;Heron et al., 2023). In other words, it is the discourse feedback that students engage in after receiving feedback that is key to feedback literacy. ...
This study aimed to develop an instrument for assessing high school students’ mathematics discourse feedback skills (MDFS) in order to measure their feedback literacy performance in mathematics. First, the researcher constructed a theoretical framework of MDFS, including comparative analysis, expressing communication, mathematical reasoning, monitor and adjust, diagnostic evaluation, and implementation capacity, through literature review, and designed the mathematics discourse feedback skills scale (MDFSS) questions accordingly. Subsequently, 9 experts conducted two rounds of content validity tests on the theoretical framework and scale questions, while 32 high school student volunteers conducted surface validity tests. Then, 273 high school students participated in the item analysis of the scale. Ultimately, 1681 high school students assessed the structural validity of the scale. In these assessments, exploratory factor analysis was conducted on 841 high school students, and confirmatory factor analysis with first-order and second-order models was conducted on 840 students. The study also conducted reliability, validity, and measurement invariance tests on the survey questionnaire. Based on the results of these analyses, the researcher confirmed that the final version of the scale consisted of 24 items. The results of the study indicated that the scale provided a valid evidence for measuring the MDFS of high school students. The study is of great significance to academic and educational practice, as it not only deepens the research on student feedback literacy in mathematics, but also provides a valuable reference tool for improving the academic quality of mathematics among high school students in China and other Asian countries.
... I explained how these filler words in Spanish could serve as pauses to gather his thoughts in the same way he was using them in English but might help him polish his speech and stay in the TL throughout the conversation. Intentional engage-ment in dialogic feedback with my students throughout the activities served as emotional and relational support, maintained an open feedback loop, and provided opportunities for students to express themselves (Steen-Utheim & Wittek, 2017). ...
This classroom practice article explores the integration of TalkAbroad, an on-line language conversation platform, in an undergraduate World Languages Education program to support pre-service language teachers' oral proficiency development. Two pre-service teachers, facing challenges like family responsibilities and limited study abroad opportunities, engaged in four 30-minute conversations on topics including media, future plans, current events, and cultural comparisons. Through structured post-conversation activities involving transcription, self-assessment , goal setting, and feedback, students exhibited increased self-awareness and confidence in their linguistic abilities. This article emphasizes the platform's positive impact on student learning and highlights TalkAbroad's potential to support language proficiency development, offering valuable insights for future language education practices.
... While the teacher's written feedback may offer students information on how well they have mastered the course topic, not all messages conveyed are explicit or even relevant to the activity at hand (Hyland, 2013;Saputra et al., 2023). In addition, McCarthy (2015) revealed in his study that written feedback is limited to text with no visual or aural element, static, and less substantial/detailed. Therefore, several educationists, such as Hounsell et al., (2008), Nicol and Macfarlane-Dick (2006), Steen-Utheim and Wittek (2017) recommend that in the higher educational context, students should participate actively in feedback activities, and communication should be organized dialogically. ...
Feedback is essential for improving EFL students' writing skills, even though it is still underutilized. Yet, only some studies examine multimodal dialogic feedback (MDF) on students' writing. To address the gap, this study, which employed an exploratory mixed-method, investigated the impact of MDF mediated by utilizing Google Docs and Zoom conferences as convenience platforms in a writing class among some Indonesian university learners and the impact of this MDF on the revision quality of the student texts. Furthermore, the study explored the students' perceptions of MDF from the formative assessment framework. While the quantitative method through classroom action research (CAR) with 39 students recruited purposively, examined the impact of MDF on students' writing skills, the qualitative approach using semi-structured in-person interviews with eleven students recruited conveniently, addressed the student's perceptions of the influence of MDF on their writing skills. The quantitative data were analyzed through simple descriptive statistical analyses to visualize the trend of students' improvement and the instructor's feedback. The qualitative data on the students' positive perceptions of the impact of MDF on their writing were analyzed using thematic analysis. Statistical analyses of the student's texts reveal that the student's writing skills are gradually developing. The results demonstrate how mediating MDF during teaching-learning writing affected the student's work on organization, content, language use, mechanics, and text length. Implications for writing instruction and the instructor's feedback are also discussed. Although this current study has limitations, suggestions for further research are offered.
... To obtain a comprehensive view regarding the use of self-monitoring, this study examined the learners' annotations as a self-monitoring technique in the writing instruction following Charles ' (1990) remark, as the most frequently used model in this domain with practical features in the writing process and feedback since existing studies (Parrott & Cherry, 2014;Saunders, 2020;Steen-Utheim & Wittek, 2017;Zigmond, 2012) have heavily relied on and lent credence to Charles's (1990) model, remarks, and arguments that, through self-monitoring, the students express their ongoing concerns and uncertainties to their teacher. In particular, the following research questions were raised in this study. ...
While peer evaluation has been widely used and studied in process-oriented writing classes, self-monitoring as a technique in writing instruction has been almost overlooked and is less explored in the Iranian English as a Foreign Language (EFL) context. The current research aimed to examine the impact of using the self-monitoring technique, compared to the conventional writing course, on Iranian intermediate EFL learners’ writing performance and their perception of the use of self-monitoring technique. In this study, 60 undergraduate EFL students doing an academic essay writing course were selected and randomly categorized into the control and experimental group. The experimental group employed the self-monitoring technique in their writing while the control group took a conventional writing class. In addition, a 50-item questionnaire was also administered before and after the experiment to examine the difference between the two groups regarding their perceptions of the self-monitoring technique. To explore the challenges and benefits of this technique, after treatment, an open-ended questionnaire was administered to some participants of the experimental group. The Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) results uncovered a statistically significant difference between the two groups concerning their writing performance and perception of the self-monitoring technique. The participants found the self-monitoring technique to be efficient in teaching writing. Furthermore, the results of this research can be useful for instructors and researchers who attempt to find an effective way of providing feedback to the students and making the revision process more interactive.
... Gikandi and Morrow (2015) considered that peer feedback develops students' self-regulated learning and reflection abilities. Peer feedback is a dialogue approach that involves emotional and rational support by allowing learners to express themselves (Steen-Utheim & Wittek, 2017). Providing comments in online discussion forums concerning their peer learning design is a mutual collaboration and social interaction among the learners. ...
This study aims to explore teachers’ peer feedback behaviour in online teaching practice classes. Qualitative research was conducted on 32 physics teachers who conducted a teacher professional curriculum. Data were gathered through interviews, observations, and online discourse archives. Six steps were taken in analysing the data: preparing and organising data, exploring data, developing themes, representing findings, interpreting findings, and validating the accuracy of the findings. The results showed that peer feedback behaviour focused on learning design content and teachers’ performance. Peer feedback connects teachers’ ideas with those of their colleagues, open-mindedness, and encourages reflective thinking. This study realises peer feedback is a mutual dialogue to enhance teachers’ pedagogical competence in teacher professional curricula.
... Dialogue feedback is conversation between student teachers and teacher to exchange information about the student teachers teaching performance. Dialogic feedback promotes students learning as it generates opportunity for the students to express themselves and contributes to an individual growth (Steen-Utheim & Wittek, 2017). Moreover, they also conducted efforts to improve their teaching practice. ...
Reflective teaching practice is an approach that promotes teachers' professional development. Experts emphasize that reflection does not occur naturally in most teachers, but it is a skill acquired through learning. Therefore, promoting the reflective practice in an early stage is pivotal. This research reports the implementation of reflective teaching strategies at an initial teacher education program in the context of Aceh. It further explores the impact of the learning on the student teachers’ practical teaching during an internship program. This study employed a qualitative inquiry for the research method. Observation and in-depth interviews were used as methods of data collection. The prospective teachers learned to reflect through several strategies; diary writing, dialogic lecturer’s feedback, recording lesson through video, and peer observation. The finding showed that the learning on reflection developed some student teachers' awareness to reflect in their teaching practice during the internship program. They assessed their strength and weaknesses in teaching by self-assessing during and after the learning took place, examining students’ involvement during classroom activities, asking students’ thoughts and feelings about the learning, and asking the supervisor’s feedback. Moreover, efforts they carried out to improve their teaching practice involved practicing teaching at home, finding out supporting materials, watching teaching videos on YouTube, and asking fellow novice teachers to conduct peer monitoring. The reflective teaching activities built their confidence in teaching, assisted them to deals with problems they encountered in real classrooms, and stimulated their creative ideas in facilitating the learning. Thus, reflective teaching practice is required to be embedded in initial teacher training curricula to generate reflective practitioners.
... This gives learners the opportunity to work with the quality and standards of the subject. This in turn makes it possible for students to understand and understand feedback (Steen-Utheim & Wittek, 2017). Dialogic feedback is a process in which individual learning can be activated because that others experiences, thoughts and utterances are made visible and available in concrete contexts. ...
Feedback in English writing plays an important role in promoting the development of students’ writing ability. As one of the feedback forms, dialogic feedback has been gradually integrated into the new teaching concept of EFL writing. This study investigates learners’ attitudes toward dialogic feedback compared with written feedback and passive oral feedback. The characteristics of dialogic interaction are observed. The effectiveness of dialogic feedback and the influence of learners’ second language ability and instructors’ noticing strategies on the quality of feedback are discussed. It especially covers the differences of learners’ focus on writing (content, organization, grammar and language) in the process of feedback. Based on the one-to-one peer feedback model of the English writing center of Nantong University, this study collects data from 65 undergraduates through feedback corpus, questionnaire survey and semi-structured interview. The results show that most learners have a positive attitude towards dialogic feedback, which can to a certain degree improve their L2 writing. The higher the learners’ L2 proficiency, the more effective the dialogic feedback is. It is also helpful to improve the quantity and quality of dialogic feedback that the tutor uses the appropriate noticing strategy. These findings not only confirm the effectiveness of dialogic feedback, but also help teachers to use dialogic feedback reasonably and improve the effectiveness of feedback in English writing class.
... From a dialogical perspective, feedback is understood as something created through dialogue in situ Säljö 2001;Steen-Utheim and Wittek 2017;Telio et al. 2015). This perspective contrasts with the traditional understanding of feedback, which focuses on the communication of a prepared message. ...
The current volume focuses on peer group mentoring for academic staff in
higher education. This is a collaborative method based on egalitarian principles
aiming to support the development of professionals by encouraging reflection in
the context of peer discussions. In higher education, this kind of mentoring can
be freely organised among colleagues, more formally implemented as part of
research or organisational development or offered as a pedagogical component
of doctoral programmes and research schools. However, the most common
implementation is through academic development programmes. This formative
learning environment can be structured in numerous ways and is often docu-
mented as a single case, but few studies have analysed how similar approaches
play out in different contexts. This is the gap that the current book addresses
through empirical studies that investigate how similar peer group mentoring
models work in different settings.
The book includes both empirical and conceptual chapters. The introductory
chapter defines and reviews the field of peer group mentoring in a global tertiary
context and presents the research project that this volume is based on. The second
chapter connects relevant feedback perspectives to peer group mentoring. Chapters 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 form the empirical core of the book, analysing and discussing how peer group mentoring is experienced in four different faculty communities. Chapter 11 summarises and discusses the findings in relation to the introductory review and concretisations, while the final two chapters comment on the significance of these findings for higher education globally. The readership of this book are both policymakers and higher education management concerned with systemic and overarching quality measures, as well as academic developers and employees seeking ways to develop supportive collegiality in their immediate professional surroundings.
It is important to note that this book is the product of collaboration among skilled
colleagues from a variety of disciplines. It has been an exciting journey to develop
the focus of each chapter and the book as a whole. Many thanks to all the contribu-
tors for their productive and meaningful cocreation. It has been both educational
and fun working with you. Also, thanks go to the participants in the peer group mentoring sessions who were willing to act as informants. Thanks also to the pub-
lisher, Springer, and a special thanks to Astrid Noordermeer, who contributed her
professional support throughout the process. Thanks also to both internal and external colleagues whose critical comments greatly improved the book’s quality.
Thomas de Lange
Line Wittek
... Previous studies have addressed the need for academic communication that motivates emotional engagement on the part of university students through the teaching practices employed by their teachers (Chalmers et al., 2018;Könings et al., 2011;Tronchoni et al., 2021). Several studies advocate reducing the use of lectures for large groups and employing active methodologies with regular feedback for students (Carr et al., 2015;Chalmers et al., 2018;Hardman, 2016;Moliní Fernández & Sánchez-González, 2019;Roberts, 2019;Steen-Utheim & Wittek, 2017). To date, however, there has been little discussion about students' preferences within these methodologies. ...
University teaching practices impact student interest, engagement, and academic performance. This paper presents a study that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to examine stu-dents' preferences for university teaching practices. We asked students in various fields open-ended questions about the best teaching practices they had experienced. Due to the large amount of data obtained, we used the AI-based language model Generative Pretrained Transformer-3 (GPT-3) to analyse the responses. With this model, we sorted students' testimonies into nine theory-based categories regarding teaching practices. After analysing the reliability of the classifications conducted by GPT-3, we found that the agreement between humans was similar to that observed between humans and the AI model, which supported its reliability. Regarding students' preferences for teaching practices, the results showed that students prefer practices that focus on (1) clarity and (2) interaction and relationships. These results enable the use of AI-based tools that facilitate the analysis of large amounts of information collected through open methods. At the didactic level, students' preferences and demand for clear teaching practices (in which ideas and activities are stated and shown without ambiguity) that are based on interaction and relationships (between teachers and students and among students themselves) are demonstrable.
... Dialogic feedback has been identified as an essential facet of educational study and practice. In the past ten years, educators have emphasized its importance (Ajjawi, & Boud, 2017;Beaumont, O'Doherty, & Shannon, 2011;Nicol, 2010;Steen-Utheim & Wittek, 2017;Yang & Carless, 2013). Moreover, dialogic feedback describes learning interactions provided by educators or peers. ...
Researchers have become increasingly interested in the notion of dialogic feedback in higher education. Despite its growing awareness of dialogic feedback, relatively little is known about how dialogic feedback is perceived through the lens of graduate students in the thesis supervision context. Hence, the purpose of this study is to explore the perceptions of graduate students regarding dialogic feedback during thesis proposal writing in a group supervision setting. An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) was undertaken to investigate the feedback experiences. Five TESOL graduate students were recruited to participate in semi-structured interviews and observations regarding supervision meetings. Two themes emerged from the findings. The first is the role of dialogic feedback in preventing students’ misunderstanding and cultivating students’ reflective thinking. Findings indicated that dialogic feedback could help improve students’ writing skills and thesis progress. The second is the positive and negative emotions encountered in the dialogic feedback experience. It contains feelings of low self-confidence, no fear of negative correction, and feelings of being motivated. The implication of the study brought to light the impact dialogic feedback has on thesis progress as well as providing a view of the dynamics between students' and supervisors' interactions in dialogic feedback experience.
... Research suggests that students find peer feedback useful, and that giving feedback might be even more useful than receiving it, but that it should be combined with expert feedback for reasons of legitimacy (Haughney et al., 2020). This aligns with the more recent definitions and understanding of feedback in that it is a dialogical process where actors should strive for a more equal balance of power (Dawson et al., 2019;Steen-Utheim & Wittek, 2017;Zhou et al., 2021). Within the workplace setting, the balance of power in feedback is less researched, but existing research indicates that peer feedback also here is seen as less threatening than feedback from superiors (Ranney et al., 2018). ...
Police officers, like other professionals, need to develop their competence and skills in correspondence with society. Peer feedback has been proven to significantly affect learning in the educational setting, and colleagues are seen as significant for the learning process in organizations. However, there seems to be little systematic knowledge concerning how verbal peer feedback affects police officers in workplace learning programs, and which elements affect this feedback. This review aims to fill this gap by analyzing 20 studies selected based on Arksey & O’Malley’s methodological framework. Findings show that police officers’ performance, motivation, and job satisfaction effectively can be improved using verbal peer feedback. It also shows some workplace conditions and factors management and feedback actors should consider when organizing for and conducting feedback. Lastly, it shows that much of the research conducted within the educational sector also is valid for police workplace learning programs. However, further research is needed, especially concerning the relationship between police peers.
... In fact these perceptions suggest that research seminars may be monologic, directive feedback spaces where students' passivity and "voicelessness" are perpetuated in an intimidating environment. However we believe that when research seminars invite students into a dialogue, they can present students with opportunities for individual growth and development (Steen-Utheim & Wittek, 2017). The findings also indicate students' perceived trifocal usefulness of research seminars in their learning-research and thesis writing, presentation skills and confidence. ...
There is no doubt that supervision plays a significant role in doctoral education. Supervisors have a fiduciary responsibility for guiding their supervisees throughout their doctoral research and theses writing journeys. In recent times however, many doctoral education programmes have adopted a collegial support system for doctoral students by introducing students’ research seminars to supplement traditional supervision. Research seminars offer both students and faculty the opportunity to engage in scholarly dialogue aimed at improving the former’s research and thesis. Although such seminars have become commonplace in many doctoral education programmes worldwide, little research exist on students’ perceptions of research seminars in doctoral learning. In this paper, we contribute to the literature by exploring the perceptions of 12 PhD students from a University in Ghana about research seminars and their usefulness in doctoral education. The findings indicate that the students perceived research seminars in doctoral education as spaces evoking manifold purposes—constructive advice; discrediting students’ work; varied views; and “muffling” students’ voices. Furthermore, the students’ perceptions of the usefulness of research seminars in their learning were trifocal in scope—research and thesis writing, presentation skills, and confidence-building. The paper makes some recommendations for improving research seminars in doctoral education for the purpose of enhancing collegial learning.
... Similarly, teachers need opportunities to get to know learners' individual differences and needs and to seek elaborative information from students beyond what students provide on a given assessment. Therefore, as many researchers have argued, rather than feedback being provided and a learner left to passively interpret the feedback on their own, a dialogue may be required for assessment to be actively engaged with by the learner and to be truly formative in nature (e.g., Nicol, 2010;Steen-Utheim & Wittek, 2017). ...
When learners need help, the literature on academic help seeking suggests that it is beneficial to reach out and ask others for help. More specifically, adaptive help seeking is considered a valuable self-regulated learning strategy in which learners seek help when they can no longer solve an academic problem on their own. However, much of the existing research on help seeking takes us to the point in the process when the student is asking for help—but how does help seeking translate into improved learning? How might different types of help seeking help students learn how to successfully navigate the learning environment? What roles do relationships with peers and teachers and their feedback play in this process? Research on assessment for formative purposes focuses on how the feedback received from teacher, peer, or self-assessment can be used to support and move forward learning. In this chapter, we aim to bring these two ideas together in order to conceptualize academic help seeking as a way in which learners seek formative feedback during the learning process, at a time when they need it the most, in order to progress in their learning. In the first section of this chapter, we review and critique the literature on academic help seeking. In the second section, we review and critique the literature on assessment for formative purposes. In the third section of this chapter, we propose that the concepts of academic help seeking and formative assessment should be integrated because they have strong theoretical overlap, rely on similar processes, and have the same ultimate purposes to move forward learning. Using the concept of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) from Vygotsky’s (1978) sociocultural theory, we offer a theoretical model linking the concepts of academic help seeking and the formative assessment process. In the fourth section, through reviewing and integrating these concepts of academic help seeking and formative assessment, we offer implications for practice to ensure that the potential benefits of help seeking for learning can be realized for students and raise some questions and empirical work still needed in this area. In the final section of the chapter, we offer a remembrance of our former doctoral advisor, Stuart Karabenick, renown in the field of academic help seeking research.
... It may be pertinent for teachers to learn about different feedback models (e.g. Boud and Molloy 2013;Steen-utheim and Wittek 2017;nicol 2020) to be able to adopt an appropriate course of action for any particular situation. ...
Feedback literacy research has largely focussed on learner processes and how teachers can support them. However, a socio-material perspective on feedback as a situated practice foregrounds the interplay between actors, resources, contexts and structures, requiring a repositioning of teachers as entangled with others within practice. This merits further exploration of teacher feedback literacies. We undertake this exploration through the theory of practice architectures, which enables us to interrogate the structures which influence the possibilities for feedback practices and illustrate them in a constructed exemplar. This approach highlights the interrelatedness of teacher and learner practices, and that knowing not only one’s own role, but how practices are co-produced, is part of feedback literacies. Teacher feedback literacies might then be considered as learning to negotiate, align and resist with/in/against the structures which continue to re-make and reproduce ‘old ways’ of doing feedback. This creates a notion of teacher-learner feedback literacies, where teacher feedback literacies are not a separate capability, but entangled and embodied knowing and acting. Efforts to develop feedback literacies must turn to embedded but explicit experiential learning about feedback. Teachers and students should be prepared for possibilities in emergent interactions, rather than following feedback formulae.
... When assessment draws strongly on summative practices, assessment becomes a monologue. The concepts of 'dialogic assessment' and 'dialogic feedback' have been used to emphasise how the learning potential of assessment is best achieved when students have an opportunity to use feedback (Steen-Utheim & Wittek, 2017). This means that assessment is not primarily used as the last word but that students could utilise feedback to enhance their mathematical work and understanding further. ...
Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a commonly used framework for designing accessible learning environments. While UDL has been reportedly applied to testing situations, much less is known about how classroom assessment (e.g., formative assessment) could be designed accessible to support the learning of all students. In this conceptual study, the previously introduced idea of Universal Design for Assessment (UDA) is reformulated in the context of mathematics. It is argued that in the test-driven assessment culture of mathematics, UDA holds specific promise; recent studies have noted that mathematics assessment does not enable students with disabilities to participate fully due to inaccessible practices. The proposed framework discussed how UDA could promote the following guidelines in mathematics assessment: i) partnership, ii) diversity, and iii) dialogue.
... In the social-affective dimension, feedback is perceived as a social and relational process that impacts learning through emotional management. The management of emotions can foster trust and balance the power relationship between educators and students, which could encourage them to share meanings and resolve misunderstandings through dialogues (Steen-Utheim & Wittek, 2017). Boud and Molloy (2013) also emphasise the importance of educator and student relationship in learning, which is an enabler of dialogues between two agents and can make feedback more effective and sustainable. ...
Feedback plays a crucial role in learning. Yet, higher education continues to face challenges regarding facilitating effective feedback processes. One of the challenges is the difficulty to track how students interact with feedback and the impact of feedback on learning outcomes. Learning analytics (LA) has opened up opportunities to enhance feedback practice with a wide array of data. However, most research seeks to deliver data-driven feedback rather than understanding how students make use of feedback and how educators can use learning analytics to support students in this process. As a first step to address this gap, our study investigated educators’ views of challenges and elements of effective feedback processes in addition to their perceptions of data-driven feedback. The study found that feedback design (e.g., feedback purpose, content, and structure), educator-related factors (e.g., time constraints and resource limitations), and student-related factors (e.g., disposition, self-regulation, and sense-making) can have positive or negative impacts on the feedback process. It also highlights the need for the development of student feedback literacy. Based on the findings, we proposed ideas for an LA-based feedback tool that can be used to facilitate a dialogic feedback process and address challenges with feedback.
The concern of this paper is with small-group discussion in university teaching as a site where feedback is typically generated and communicated to humanities and social sciences students on their everyday learning. The theme is explored by means of a wide-ranging review of the salient literature, considered afresh through the lens of feedback, and against the backcloth of an ongoing transformation in how feedback in higher education is understood, investigated and practised. It concludes that, in contrast to feedback on graded students' assessments, feedback in small-group discussion is characteristically embedded in real-time teaching-learning interchanges, verbally expressed, generated by student peers as well as by the tutor and, since it is on open display, offers opportunities for vicarious learning. It is also a crucial milieu in which students can practise and be guided towards discursive verbal fluency in discipline-specific meaning-making. Nonetheless, the feedback potential of learning through discussion is often unrealised, and robust evidence is lacking of its impact on the quality of learning over time.
The present study employed a qualitative research design to investigate possible differences between L2 master’s and doctoral students’ preferences for supervisor written feedback. Although the role of learners’ preferences, as a part of attitudinal engagement, has been emphasized in the literature on feedback, there are still niches in the literature that need to be occupied. One of these gaps is the examination of L2 master’s and doctoral students’ preferences for supervisor written feedback on their theses/dissertations. To bridge this research gap, the researcher interviewed 52 master’s and 21 doctoral Iranian English Language Teaching students. Thematic analysis of the interview data identified five main preferences: feedback that is clear, specific, encouraging, dialogic, and non-appropriative. The examination of interview data showed that both master’s and doctoral students expressed high levels of preference for receiving clear and encouraging feedback. A significantly higher percentage of master’s students expressed their preference for specific comments. In contrast, doctoral students exhibited heightened preferences for non-appropriative and dialogic feedback. The findings also provided insights into the underlying factors that can shape master’s and doctoral students’ preferences. Several practical implications and suggestions for further research are also discussed in this study.
In public schools in the United States, the work of an ESOL student teacher is characterized by relationships with multiple mentors, including a university supervisor. Through retrospective narrative accounts, this study examines what currently practicing teachers of multilingual learners retained of their supervisors' feedback from their student teaching days, and what nuggets of supervisory wisdom continue to resonate with them throughout their teaching careers. The researchers developed this qualitative study using a social constructivist lens informed by Carless and Winstone's (2023) feedback literacy dimensions. Interviews were conducted with eight current teachers to probe their recollections of supervision and integration of supervisory feedback into their practice. Findings suggest that the participants recalled a sprinkling of memories and continued to draw on a few pieces of supervisory advice in their current practice. Supervisors and student teachers demonstrated design, relational, and pragmatic dimensions of feedback literacy, though the relational (i.e., the quality of the relationship between supervisor and student teacher) was the most enduring, even if the specifics of the supervisory feedback faded. Implications suggest that teacher education programs can hone the purpose, mission, and methods of supervision by targeting the dimensions of feedback literacy to make supervisory feedback more constructive and impactful.
Background
Society has an increasing demand for nurses, but the availability of clinical placements for nursing students does not keep pace with this need. As a result, the use of simulation as a supplement or replacement for clinical practice is being discussed. Simulation can be a resource-intensive learning method, making it important to consider how simulation can be organized and implemented as efficiently as possible without compromising learning outcomes.
Objective
To explore students' experiences with different ways of organizing simulation. Method: Qualitative design inspired by action research. A purposive sample of 24 students was selected, and data was collected through eight focus group interviews. Inductive content analysis was used for data analysis.
Results
Three main categories emerged: the importance of a conducive level of stress for learning, feelings of responsibility and autonomy, and constructive feedback and reflection.
Conclusion
The findings suggest that the presence of a facilitator in all stages of simulation may not necessarily be the most effective approach for learning. It appears that the facilitator could focus more on organizing the simulation so that all participants can actively engage, while utilizing their time to plan scenarios, establish a safe learning environment, and participate in a summary session to clarify unresolved academic questions and nursing practices
Eleştirel ve yaratıcı düşünce 21. yüzyıl öğrenenlerinin geliştirmesi gereken önemli becerilerdir. Bu araştırma, açık ve uzaktan öğrenme ortamlarında eleştirel ve yaratıcı düşünceyi geliştirmek için, etkileşimli öğrenme senaryosunda hangi unsurların bulunması gerektiğini ortaya çıkarmayı ve etkileşimli öğrenme senaryo tasarımına yönelik bir kontrol listesi oluşturmayı amaçlamaktadır. Belirlenen amaç doğrultusunda Hetagoji kuramı ve Sorgulamaya Dayalı Öğrenme kuramı çalışmanın kuramsal çerçevesini oluşturmaktadır. Bu anlamda çalışma, etkileşimli senaryo oluşturma sürecine Hetagojik bir yaklaşımla Sorgulamaya Dayalı Öğrenme bağlamında bütüncül bir bakış açısı oluşturarak alanyazına katkı sağlaması açısından önemlidir. Çalışma nitel araştırma yaklaşımlarından biri olan durum çalışması ile desenlenmiştir. Veriler, yarı yapılandırılmış görüşme formlarıyla yüz yüze ve çevrimiçi olarak yedi alan uzmanıyla görüşme yapılarak toplanmıştır. Toplanan veriler, NVivo12 paket programıyla analiz edilerek, dört ana tema, on altı tema, elli beş alt temaya ulaşılmıştır. Bu bağlamda oluşturulan kontrol listesi genel olarak; önceki bilgiyle yeni bilgiyi bütünleştirme, süreç içinde öğrenene başarı mutluluğu yaşatma, farklı öğrenme stillerine yönelik farklı öğrenme yolu seçenekleri sunma, dallanma yapıları ve oryantasyon eklentisi oluşturma, açık uçlu soruları, örnek olayları, yaşamdan hikâyeleri, tartışma forumlarını bütün sürece yayma, uygun yazılım seçme şeklinde özetlenebilir.
This chapter reports on the results of observation-based peer group mentoring (OPGM) at the Faculty of Theology. Groups of three to four teachers worked together for one semester, observing each other’s teaching styles and participating in presupervision and postsupervision sessions. The aim of the OPGM was to improve collaboration among the teachers and increase students’ awareness of the connections between the different components of the study programme. The topics that were discussed often were (1) teaching design, (2) the connection between theory and practice in teaching, (3) the communication between teachers and students and (4) the dissemination of teaching. Based on a dialogical approach to learning, we analysed the learning potential of the mentoring sessions. Members of all groups developed conversation patterns characterised by emotional and relational support, opportunities to express themselves, continuation of initiatives and joint development of new insights. However, the manner in which conversational dynamics were established and developed emerged differently in each group. We conclude that the learning opportunities provided through OPGM are uniquely created in each group. Therefore, to allow trust to be established across OPGM groups, it is crucial to set aside sufficient time and a suitable working space to have confidential conversations with minimal interruptions.
As a theoretical contribution, this chapter focuses on feedback in the context of peer group mentoring. Core questions include how feedback dialogues are established in practice and which aspects of feedback dialogues are crucial for successful feedback. These questions are discussed in relation to research and theory within the field of feedback – a research field marked by a distinct shift in recent years. Although the traditional focus has been on how feedback is presented, this has now shifted towards how the recipient of the feedback (1) interprets and conceptualises what is said and (2) how they apply the feedback in ways that change their knowledge, self-understanding and/or practice. Here, a theoretical model is suggested, including four crucial dimensions of how feedback practices are established: relational aspects, interactional aspects, frames and structure and the substantial content of the dialogues. The model is developed to reveal the complexity of feedback in peer relationships, proposing a number of categories for further research on peer group mentoring. One can also use the model as a conversational tool when participants meet to clarify the expectations and procedures for peer mentoring in their own individual contexts.
The major purpose of this study was to explore tutors pedagogical practices in the teaching and learning of mathematics education in primary teachers colleges in Uganda.
This study employed qualitative research approach. That being the case, Qualitative approach was based upon the interpretive constructivist underpinnings whose aim was to explain the phenomenon from the subjective reasoning based on participants’ opinions, realities, meanings, attitudes, and motivations that lie behind their social behaviour.
This study used case study research design. A total of twelve (12) respondents participated in this study. These included six (6) Mathematics Tutors and six (6) Student teachers. Tutors were selected using purposive sampling technique also known as judgemental sampling and Pre-service students were selected using Convenience sampling. The study used face to face semi structured interviews and observation strategies for data collection. Data was collected using semi structured Interview guide and observation guide.
From this study it was revealed that Tutors engage student teachers during the teaching and learning of mathematics through giving them a chance to respond to questions, through material production among others. They assess students through asking them oral questions projects and presentations. Finally, tutors provide feedback to student teachers verbally and sometimes in written form for example after marking their work.
Upon thorough examination of the findings, the researcher discovered certain gaps and consequently, put forward the subsequent recommendations. Similar study should be done to cover a range of colleges to give a wider national picture for the best comparison of the extent to which pedagogical practices applied by tutors in Uganda influence the quality of prospective teachers in the teaching and learning of mathematics education. To enrich this study, another research can be conducted on integration of Information Communication and Technology (ICT) in acquisition of appropriate pedagogical practices by prospective teachers in the teaching and learning of mathematics.
This study determines and analyzes the principles of interactive scenario design supporting critical and creative thinking in asynchronous learning environments. The study was conducted as a qualitative research, framed by two theoretical approaches, heutagogy and inquiry-based learning, and a holistic case study. The basic principles of the theoretical approaches and then theoretical matrix where sixteen semi-structured interview questions transformed later on were the beginning of the study. Semi-structured interview questions were given to 7 open and distance learning field experts and the data was collected. For the data analysis descriptive and content analysis, for content analysis inductive analysis was used. NVivo12 was employed. The result of the study shows that in the design of interactive scenarios which is the basis of interactive videos, 4 main themes, which are (1) Support Productivity with Natural Curiosity, (2) Create Self-awareness, (3) Provide Self-discovery, (4) Spark off Intellectual Transformation, 16 themes describing the main themes and 55 sub-themes were achieved. The components leading the interactive scenario design where the themes explaining the main themes and the sub-themes take place were used as a checklist in the form of hypothesis.
Modern societies are characterized by unprecedently broad and fast diffusion of various forms of false and harmful information. Military personnel’s motivation to defend their country may be harmed by their exposure to disinformation. Therefore, specific education and training programs should be devised for the military to systematically improve (social) media literacy and build resilience against information influence activities. In this article, we put forward a useful methodological approach to designing such programs based on a case study: the process of developing a media literacy learning platform tailored to the needs of the Estonian defense forces in 2021. The approach is grounded in data on (a) the current needs and skills of the learners, (b) the kinds of influence activities that the learners may encounter, and (c) the learning design principles that would enhance their learning experience, such as learning through play and dialogue through feedback.
This paper reports on a study investigating the implementation of peer support groups (PSGs) for the purpose of supervisor development in higher education. The context for the study is a national doctoral programme in Norway, where PSGs were introduced as an important part of measures aimed at the development of PhD supervisors. The aim of the PSGs was to establish forums for discussions of specific challenges that the supervisors faced in their supervision. Furthermore, our aim was to contribute to supervision development via meaning-making, problem-structuring and problem-solving. The supervisors discuss challenges from their own supervision practices according to a specific five-phase model. Using a combination of thematic analysis and interaction analysis, we found that the discussions enabled by the PSGs resulted in altered comprehensions of the challenging situations the supervisors faced, as well as thoroughly considered strategies with which to progress.
Propósito:
En este ensayo bibliográfico se analizan las perspectivas e investigación reciente sobre retroalimentación. El argumento central sostiene que es necesario un enfoque pedagógico y dialógico para indagar sobre la interacción entre docente-estudiante y las formas en que participan, interpretan y utilizan la información de la retroalimentación el estudiantado para construir conocimiento.
Discusión:
El debate se focaliza en la crítica al enfoque de transmisión de información que limita la retroalimentación como una práctica monólogica-unidirecccional centrada en el profesorado. En contraposición, el enfoque socio-constructivista la comprende como un fenómeno social en el que interactúan docentes y estudiantes. Sin embargo, ambas perspectivas reducen la discusión a la búsqueda de un modelo genérico para las buenas prácticas y limitan su función al logro del aprendizaje como producto cognitivo.
Conclusiones:
Es importante enriquecer el estudio en el campo desde un enfoque pedagógico y de naturaleza social que asuma la retroalimentación como una interacción con la finalidad de problematizar las perspectivas dominantes que delimitan su acción como producto cognitivo relacionado con el rendimiento académico en contextos de educativos.
In the use of simulation activity as a learning approach, the debriefing phase is considered as crucial to achieve learning. In debriefing, the participants reflect and discuss what happened in the scenario. Feedback is an important factor, and research shows that there must be certain conditions present to achieve learning from feedback. The facilitator and the structure used impact on these conditions. In this chapter, we will present a new structure for debriefing in simulation based on a study focusing on how the structure affects the facilitator role.
ABSTRACT
This article addresses writing in higher education with the primary aim of
conceptualizing writing as a mediational tool. The conceptual framework
consists of three concepts: learning trajectories, mediation, and
recontextualization. The article describes how writing can work as a
mediational tool and suggests possible implications for higher
education. An empirical study from the context of initial teacher
education in Norway is used for the purpose of illustration. Writing
activities can mediate learning in important ways. However, design
elements that make students explore, contrast, and compare different
meaning potentials and position themselves within disciplinary or
professional discourse are crucial when considering the potential of
writing as a mediational tool in higher education.
This paper develops a dialogic theory of thinking and of learning to think that has implications for education. The theory is offered as a contrast to theories that are based on both Piaget and Vygotsky. The paper proceeds by unpacking and interweaving three key concepts: dialogue, thinking and learning in order to argue that learning to think can be understood as a shift in self-identification towards becoming dialogue. This theory is then applied to the context of primary classrooms through the analysis of three short episodes of interaction. These analyses offer evidence that a dialogic theory of learning to think can offer new and valuable insights into classroom interaction with the potential to inform pedagogy.
The preceding articles in this issue describe a diverse range of projects which had in common the aim of implementing or improving the practice of formative assessment, and thereby to secure some of the benefits attributed to it. This article attempts to set up a framework within which each of the different studies may be located and inter-related. There are three main sections. The first deals with the roles of assessment, both formative and summative, within a comprehensive model of pedagogy. The second considers the specific ways in which the different practices of assessment feedback help to develop the capacity of each student to become a thoughtful and independent learner. The third reviews the ways in which new assessment practices present problems to teachers in challenging them to re-think their role and similarly to students, when for both groups, new practices affect their ways of coping in the classroom.
This article explores some of the main barriers to the enhancement of feedback processes and proposes a framework for using dialogic feedback to foster productive student learning in the discipline. The framework suggests a feedback triangle focused on the content of feedback (cognitive dimension), the interpersonal negotiation of feedback (social-affective dimension) and the organisation of feedback provision (structural dimension). The interplay between these three elements is central to prospects for the enhancement of feedback processes. Derived from the framework is a set of six key features of optimal feedback practice which we represent as building blocks of an architecture of dialogic feedback. The paper concludes with a research agenda which suggests issues to be further explored in the cognitive, social-affective and structural dimensions.
Feedback is central to the development of student learning, but within the constraints of modularized learning in higher education it is increasingly difficult to handle effectively. This article makes a case for sustainable feedback as a contribution to the reconceptualization of feedback processes. The data derive from the Student Assessment and Feedback Enhancement project, involving in‐depth semi‐structured interviews with a purposive sample of award‐winning teachers. The findings focus on those reported practices consistent with a framework for sustainable feedback, and particularly highlight the importance of student self‐regulation. The article concludes by setting out some possibilities and challenges for staff and student uptake of sustainable feedback.
The paper addresses the way in which participants in a qualitative study drew upon accounts of relationships and emotions in sharing their perceptions of assessment. By first exploring ideas about emotions and relationships in learning and assessment through the literature and subsequently discussing an interpretation of participant narratives, the author suggests that emotions and relationships surrounding past learning and assessment contexts can influence current perceptions of assessment and learning in powerful ways. The study also reveals how students value opportunities to express their beliefs, feelings and emotions during the assessment process. They also expect teachers to balance objectivity in assessment with empathy for those parts of themselves shared in the process. The conclusion is drawn that there are important implications for learning in the emotional response of students to assessment and in the nature of teaching and learning relationships that are worthy of further investigation.
The paper presents research findings on students’ experiences of the provision both of guidance and feedback, and with respect to examinations as well as coursework assignments. A first‐ and a final‐year bioscience course unit were surveyed in each of three contrasting university departments. The resulting dataset comprised 782 completed student questionnaires and 23 group interviews with a total of 69 students. Although the questionnaire data provided a robust overall picture of the students’ perceptions of guidance and feedback across the six units, the interview data made possible a much finer‐grained analysis of their experiences. At the core of this analysis was a guidance and feedback loop, within which six interrelated steps have been picked out, beginning with the students’ prior experiences of cognate assessments and closing with the potential of what has been learned from a given task to feed forward into subsequent work. By pinpointing potential troublespots, the framework can serve as a valuable diagnostic as well as analytical tool.
In recent years there has been an increasing emphasis in higher education on the explicit articulation of assessment standards and requirements, whether this emanates from calls for public accountability or is based on ideas of good educational practice (Ecclestone, 2001). We argue in this article that a single‐minded focus on explicit articulation, whilst currently the dominant logic of higher education, will inevitably fall short of providing students and staff with meaningful knowledge of standards and criteria. Inherent difficulties in the explicit verbal description of standards and criteria make a compelling argument for the consideration of the role of structured processes that support the effective transfer of both explicit and tacit assessment knowledge. With reference to both empirical evidence and the literature, we propose a conceptual framework for the transfer of knowledge of assessment criteria and standards that encompasses a spectrum of tacit and explicit processes, which has proven to be effective in practice in improving student performance.
Dialogic Education and Technology is about using new technology to draw people into the kind of dialogues which take them beyond themselves into learning, thinking and creativity. The program of research reported in this book reveals key characteristics of learning dialogues and demonstrates ways in which computers and networks can deepen, enrich and expand such dialogues. A dialogic perspective is developed drawing upon recent work in communications theory, psychology, computer science and philosophy. This perspective foregrounds the creative space opened up by authentic dialogues. Whereas studies of computer-supported collaborative learning have tended to see dialogue as a means to the end of knowledge construction the dialogic perspective taken by this book sees dialogue as an end in itself - in fact moving learners into the space of dialogue is described as the core aim of education. The central argument of the book is that there is a convergence between this dialogic perspective in education and the affordances of new information and communications technology. A genuinely dialogic perspective is relatively new to the field of educational technology and there is a considerable amount of interest in this topic amongst researchers who wish to see what extra insights, if any, a dialogical approach can offer them.
"This is an exciting book that synthesizes, clarifies and extends mounting discussions of dialogical thinking related to computer-supported education [...]. It is not only a delightful personal statement, but provokes thought on central issues of CSCL and enters into challenging dialog with the relevant alternative approaches. As a result of reading this book, I am convinced that we urgently need to open new online spaces for people to understandingly interact with different perspectives and creatively generate new insight and respect for difference."
-Gerry Stahl
Executive Editor of the International Journal of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning
This book offers a set of lenses which give deep insight into education and the use of technologies for learning. The moves between empirical studies, theoretical reflections and discussion of the design of learning environments make the book very thought provoking. Ideas are not just treated as ideas but they become transformed into principles for design.
Wegerif is convincing that the use of technology for the creation, maintaining and development of dialogical spaces has the potential for transforming and expanding educational experiences in a way which offers a needed vision of learning for the future.
-Sten Ludvigsen
Director of the InterMedia Centre for design, communication and learning University of Oslo
Abstract Assessment practices in higher education institutions tend not to equip students well for the processes of effective learning in a learning society. The purposes of assessment should be extended to include the preparation of students for sustainable assessment. Sustainable assessment encompasses,the abilities required to undertake activities that necessarily accompany,learning throughout life in formal and informal settings. Characteristics of effective formative assessment identified by recent research are used to illustrate features of sustainable assessment. Acts of assessment need both to meet the specific and immediate goals of a course as well as establishing a basis for students to undertake their own assessment activities in the future. To draw attention to the importance of this, the idea that assessment always has to do double duty is introduced.
Student surveys across the world have highlighted that students are dissatisfied with the feedback they receive on their assignments and many institutions have been putting plans in place to address this issue. Much of this work has focused on improving the quality of written comments. This paper takes a different perspective. It argues that the many diverse expressions of dissatisfaction with written feedback, both from students and teachers, are all symptoms of impoverished dialogue. Mass higher education is squeezing out dialogue with the result that written feedback, which is essentially a one‐way communication, often has to carry almost all the burden of teacher–student interaction. The paper suggests ways in which the nature and quality of feedback dialogue can be enhanced when student numbers are large without necessarily increasing demands on academic staff. It concludes with a conceptual discussion of the merits of taking a dialogical approach when designing feedback.
This article reports the findings of research into the student experience of assessment in school/college and higher education, and the impact of transition upon student perceptions of feedback quality. It involved a qualitative study of 23 staff and 145 students in six schools/colleges and three English universities across three disciplines. Results show that students experience a radically different culture of feedback in schools/colleges and higher education, with the former providing extensive formative feedback and guidance, while the latter focuses upon independent learning judged summatively. Students perceived quality feedback as part of a dialogic guidance process rather than a summative event. A model is proposed, the Dialogic Feedback Cycle, to describe student experiences at school/college, and suggestions are made as to how it can be used as a tool to scaffold the development of independent learning throughout the first year of university study.
The purpose of this study was to describe assessment practices as these were experienced by tutors and students in one higher education establishment. Eighty members of faculty staff (80% return) and 130 3rd-year undergraduates (100% return) completed a 40-item questionnaire on their experiences of assessment. The questionnaire included items on the purpose of assessment, the nature and demand level of the tasks which were assessed, the timing of assessment and the procedures for marking and reporting. Statistical analyses of the data showed that there was a significant difference of perception between the two groups. These results are discussed in terms of alternative theoretical models of assessment and suggest that while staff declared a commitment to the formative purposes of assessment and maintained that the full range of learning was frequently assessed, they engaged in practices which militated against formative assessment and authentic assessment being fully realised.
There have been many recommendations for dialogue to be part of the feedback process for students in higher education. In this paper, we report on the findings of feedback-dialogue practices among 17 history, politics and international relations undergraduate students. The study is based on findings obtained from semi-structured interviews and focus groups which sought to explore the extent to which students perceive feedback-dialogues to be part of their learning experience and subsequently the value they place upon them. The aim of the research is to develop strategies for encouraging dialogue between lecturer–student and student–student to enhance the students’ experiences of feedback. Analysis of the results indicates the existence of a ‘top-down’ approach to dialogue between lecturers and students and gaps in opportunities for these types of exchange. A range of strategies for creating models which address these two issues are proposed.
Since the beginning of the century, feedback interventions (FIs) produced negative--but largely ignored--effects on performance. A meta-analysis (607 effect sizes; 23,663 observations) suggests that FIs improved performance on average (
d = .41) but that over one-third of the FIs decreased performance. This finding cannot be explained by sampling error, feedback sign, or existing theories. The authors proposed a preliminary FI theory (FIT) and tested it with moderator analyses. The central assumption of FIT is that FIs change the locus of attention among 3 general and hierarchically organized levels of control: task learning, task motivation, and meta-tasks (including self-related) processes. The results suggest that FI effectiveness decreases as attention moves up the hierarchy closer to the self and away from the task. These findings are further moderated by task characteristics that are still poorly understood. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
This paper reports the findings of a two-year research project focused on developing students' understanding of assessment criteria and the assessment process through a structured intervention involving both tacit and explicit knowledge transfer methods. The nature of the intervention is explained in detail, and the outcomes are analysed and discussed. The conclusions drawn from the evidence are that student learning can be improved significantly through such an intervention, and that this improvement may last over time and be transferable, at least within similar contexts. This work is a development within a longer and ongoing research project into criterion-referenced assessment tools and processes which has been undertaken in the pursuit of a conceptually sound and functional assessment framework that would promote and encourage common standards of assessment; that project is also sum-marised.
Taylor and Francis Ltd CSHE_A_157196.sgm 10.1080/03075070600572132 Studies in Higher Education 0307-5079 (print)/1470-174X (online) Original Article 2006 Society for Research into Higher Education 31 2 000000April 2006 DavidCarless Faculty of EducationUniversity of Hong KongPokfulamHong Kongdcarless@hkucc.hku.hk Feedback is central to the development of effective learning, yet is comparatively underresearched. This article seeks to examine the notion of written feedback on assignments and argue that this feedback process is more complex than is sometimes acknowledged. The author illustrates the prob-lematic nature of assignment feedback by drawing on a large-scale questionnaire survey conducted across eight universities, and then analysing the issue in more depth though fine-grained data collected from students in a teacher education institute. The article is framed by the concepts of discourse, power and emotion. It highlights a number of different perceptions of students and tutors towards the assessment, marking and feedback process. The author concludes by arguing that 'assessment dialogues' are a way forward to mitigate some of the mistrust or misconceptions that may be unwanted outcomes of the assessment process.
The research on formative assessment and feedback is reinterpreted to show how these processes can help students take control of their own learning, i.e. become self-regulated learners. This refor-mulation is used to identify seven principles of good feedback practice that support self-regulation. A key argument is that students are already assessing their own work and generating their own feedback, and that higher education should build on this ability. The research underpinning each feedback principle is presented, and some examples of easy-to-implement feedback strategies are briefly described. This shift in focus, whereby students are seen as having a proactive rather than a reactive role in generating and using feedback, has profound implications for the way in which teachers organise assessments and support learning.
An important rationale for higher education is that it equips students for learning beyond the point of graduation. Th is paper considers the role that assessment plays in this. It suggests we need to take a new perspective on assessment: assessment to promote learning throughout life. It focuses on ideas that can be used to contribute to the construction of assessment practices and on wider implications for course design. It concludes by exploring barriers to acceptance of this perspective and how they might be addressed. As is well understood, assessment fulfi ls more than one role. It grades students and eventually certifi cates them, but it also has a part to play in aiding their learning. While early books about assessment emphasised its summative function, seeing the student's role as that of test taker, the balance between these two functions has changed over recent decades, and the formative function now has greater prominence. Most early books about assessment featured examples of what Serafi ni (2000) called 'assessment as measurement'. Th is paradigm of assessment was followed, Serafi ni suggests, by two further paradigms: 'assessment as procedure' and 'assessment as enquiry'. Th e role of the student has also changed, and many teachers now aim to encourage their students to be active agents in their own learning. It would however be premature to suggest that the formative function of assessment is now central, even though many higher education institutions have policy statements that acknowledge it. Rowntree (1987) also identifi ed a further purpose of assessment. He argued that it should help prepare students for life. It is this purpose that interests and concerns us. Boud (2000) explored this purpose further, conceptualising it as 'sustainable assessment'. In this paper we ask how, and to what extent, assessment has a role in preparing students for learning in professional life. It is our belief that much current assessment is inadequate to the task of preparing learners for a lifetime of learning. However, there are some practices that have moved this agenda in the right direction. We shall look at some assessment initiatives that might contribute to preparation for lifelong learning and discuss implications of the agenda of lifelong assessment for the design of assessment practices.
Performance feedback is an important part of many organizational interventions. Managers typically assume that providing employees with feedback about their performance makes it more likely that performance on the job will be improved. Despite the prevalence of feedback mechanisms in management interventions, however, feedback is not always as effective as is typically assumed. In this article, we present specific conditions under which feedback might be less effective, or even harmful. We then discuss the implications of our results and model for designing of interventions aimed at improving performance, and focus more narrowly on 360-degree appraisal systems. After arguing that these systems typically have design characteristics that reduce effectiveness, we conclude with recommendations for improving their effectiveness. We also emphasize the need for systematic evaluations of feedback interventions.
A variety of understandings of feedback exist in the literature, which can broadly be categorised as cognitivist information transmission and socio-constructivist. Understanding feedback as information transmission or ‘telling’ has until recently been dominant. However, a socio-constructivist perspective of feedback posits that feedback should be dialogic and help to develop students’ ability to monitor, evaluate and regulate their learning. This paper is positioned as part of the shift away from seeing feedback as input, to exploring feedback as a dialogical process focusing on effects, through presenting an innovative methodological approach to analysing feedback dialogues in situ. Interactional analysis adopts the premise that artefacts and technologies set up a social field, where understanding human–human and human–material activities and interactions is important. The paper suggests that this systematic approach to analysing dialogic feedback can enable insight into previously undocumented aspects of feedback, such as the interactional features that promote and sustain feedback dialogue. The paper discusses methodological issues in such analyses and implications for research on feedback.
Feedback has long been considered a vital component of training in the health professions. Nonetheless, it remains difficult to enact the feedback process effectively. In part, this may be because, historically, feedback has been framed in the medical education literature as a unidirectional content-delivery process with a focus on ensuring the learner's acceptance of the content. Thus, proposed solutions have been organized around mechanistic, educator-driven, and behavior-based best practices. Recently, some authors have begun to highlight the role of context and relationship in the feedback process, but no theoretical frameworks have yet been suggested for understanding or exploring this relational construction of feedback in medical education. The psychotherapeutic concept of the "therapeutic alliance" may be valuable in this regard.In this article, the authors propose that by reorganizing constructions of feedback around an "educational alliance" framework, medical educators may be able to develop a more meaningful understanding of the context-and, in particular, the relationship-in which feedback functions. Use of this framework may also help to reorient discussions of the feedback process from effective delivery and acceptance to negotiation in the environment of a supportive educational relationship.To explore and elaborate these issues and ideas, the authors review the medical education literature to excavate historical and evolving constructions of feedback in the field, review the origins of the therapeutic alliance and its demonstrated utility for psychotherapy practice, and consider implications regarding learners' perceptions of the supervisory relationship as a significant influence on feedback acceptance in medical education settings.
This article reports on a study concerning secondary school students' meaning-making of socio-scientific issues in Information and Communication Technology-mediated settings. Our theoretical argument has as its point of departure the analytical distinction between 'doing science' and 'doing school,' as two different forms of classroom activity. In the study we conducted an analysis of students working with web-based groupware systems concerned with genetics. The analysis identified how the students oriented their accounts of scientific concepts and how they attempted to understand the socio-scientific task in different ways. Their orientations were directed towards finding scientific explanations, towards exploring the ethical and social consequences, and towards 'fact-finding.' The students' different orientations seemed to contribute to an ambivalent tension, which, on the one hand, was productive because it urged them into ongoing discussions and explicit meaning-making. On the other hand, however, the tension elucidated how complex and challenging collaborative learning situations can be. Our findings suggest that in order to obtain a deeper understanding of students' meaning-making of socio-scientific issues in Information and Communication Technology-mediated settings, it is important not only to address how students perform the activity of 'doing science.' It is equally important to be sensitive with respect to how students orient their talk and activity towards more or less explicit values, demands, and expectations embedded in the educational setting. In other words, how students perform the activity of 'doing school.'
This article presents a thematic analysis of the research evidence on assessment feedback in higher education (HE) from 2000 to 2012. The focus of the review is on the feedback that students receive within their coursework from multiple sources. The aims of this study are to (a) examine the nature of assessment feedback in HE through the undertaking of a systematic review of the literature, (b) identify and discuss dominant themes and discourses and consider gaps within the research literature, (c) explore the notion of the feedback gap in relation to the conceptual development of the assessment feedback field in HE, and (d) discuss implications for future research and practice. From this comprehensive review of the literature, the concept of the feedback landscape, informed by sociocultural and socio-critical perspectives, is developed and presented as a valuable framework for moving the research agenda into assessment feedback in HE forward.
Feedback is one of the most powerful influences on learning and achievement, but this impact can be either positive or negative. Its power is frequently mentioned in articles about learning and teaching, but surprisingly few recent studies have systematically investigated its meaning. This article provides a conceptual analysis of feedback and reviews the evidence related to its impact on learning and achievement. This evidence shows that although feedback is among the major influences, the type of feedback and the way it is given can be differentially effective. A model of feedback is then proposed that identifies the particular properties and circumstances that make it effective, and some typically thorny issues are discussed, including the timing of feedback and the effects of positive and negative feedback. Finally, this analysis is used to suggest ways in which feedback can be used to enhance its effectiveness in classrooms.
Within the broad field of research on learning, culture and social interaction, sociocultural theory is now commonly used as an explanatory conceptual framework. In this article we begin by setting out the essential elements of this theory as it applies to a specific area of enquiry in which we have been involved, which is aimed at understanding the educational functions of classroom talk. In doing so, we will discuss some key concepts generated by the theory. We then review empirical research on talk and learning which has been inspired and informed by a sociocultural perspective, and go on to consider the educational implications of its findings. Finally, we consider how research on the educational functions of classroom talk might be developed, both theoretically and empirically, by using a sociocultural framework to link it with other lines of enquiry into learning and cognitive development.
Ikujiro Nonaka e Hirotaka Takeuchi establecen una vinculación del desempeño de las empresas japonesas con su capacidad para crear conocimiento y emplearlo en la producción de productos y tecnologías exitosas en el mercado. Los autores explican que hay dos tipos de conocimiento: el explícito, contenido en manuales y procedimientos, y el tácito, aprendido mediante la experiencia y comunicado, de manera indirecta, en forma de metáforas y analogías. Mientras los administradores estadounidenses se concentran en el conocimiento explícito, los japoneses lo hacen en el tácito y la clave de su éxito estriba en que han aprendido a convertir el conocimiento tácito en explícito. Finalmente, muestran que el mejor estilo administrativo para crear conocimiento es el que ellos denominan centro-arriba-abajo, en el que los gerentes de niveles intermedios son un puente entre los ideales de la alta dirección y la realidad caótica de los niveles inferiores.
Academic emotions have largely been neglected by educational psychology, with the exception of test anxiety. In 5 qualitative studies, it was found that students experience a rich diversity of emotions in academic settings. Anxiety was reported most often, but overall, positive emotions were described no less frequently than negative emotions. Based on the studies in this article, taxonomies of different academic emotions and a self-report instrument measuring students' enjoyment, hope, pride, relief, anger, anxiety, shame, hopelessness, and boredom (Academic Emotions Questionnaire [AEQ]) were developed. Using the AEQ, assumptions of a cognitive-motivational model of the achievement effects of emotions, and of a control/value theory of their antecedents (Pekrun, 1992b, 2000), were tested in 7 cross-sectional, 3 longitudinal, and 1 diary study using samples of university and school students. Results showed that academic emotions are significantly related to students' motivation, learning strategies, cognitive resources, self-regulation, and academic achievement, as well as to personality and classroom antecedents. The findings indicate that affective research in educational psychology should acknowledge emotional diversity in academic settings by addressing the full range of emotions experienced by students at school and university.
Current literature provides useful insights into the role of assessment feedback in student learning, yet fails to recognise its complexity as a unique form of communication. This article outlines ideas emerging from ongoing research into the meaning and impact of assessment feedback for students in higher education. We argue that new models of communication are required to understand students' responses to the language of tutors' comments, and that issues of discourse, identity, power, control and social relationships should be central to any understanding of assessment feedback as a communication process. Implications of adopting an alternative perspective for research and practice are identified and discussed.
Much evaluation of teaching focuses on what teachers do in class. This article focuses on the evaluation of assessment arrangements and the way they affect student learning out of class. It is assumed that assessment has an overwhelming influence on what, how and how much students study. The article proposes a set of 'conditions under which assessment supports learning' and justifies these with reference to theory, empirical evidence and practical experience. These conditions are offered as a framework for teachers to review the effectiveness of their own assessment practice.
Within many higher education systems there is a search for means to increase levels of student satisfaction with assessment feedback. This article suggests that the search is under way in the wrong place by concentrating on feedback as a product rather than looking more widely to feedback as a long-term dialogic process in which all parties are engaged. A three-year study, focusing on engaging students with assessment feedback, is presented and analysed using an analytical model of stages of engagement. The analysis suggests that a more holistic, socially-embedded conceptualisation of feedback and engagement is needed. This conceptualisation is likely to encourage tutors to support students in more productive ways, which enable students to use feedback to develop their learning, rather than respond mechanistically to the tutors’ ‘instruction’.
The topic of feedback to students is an under‐researched area, and there has been little empirical research published which focuses on student perceptions. This study explores student perceptions of written feedback and examines whether feedback received demonstrated a student‐centred approach to learning. A multi‐method approach of qualitative and quantitative data collection and analysis was used to survey 44 students in the faculties of Business and Art & Design. Student responses show feedback is valued, but believed tutor comments could be more helpful. Survey results indicate that students may need advice on understanding and using feedback before they can engage with it. Content analysis of feedback samples and student responses uncovered four main themes of feedback considered unhelpful to improve learning: comments which were too general or vague, lacked guidance, focused on the negative, or were unrelated to assessment criteria. It is suggested that by focusing on messages conveyed by their writing, providing feedback set in the context of assessment criteria and learning outcomes, and by ensuring that it is timely, tutors could greatly improve the value of feedback.
While effective feedback has frequently been identified as a key strategy in learning and teaching, little known research has focused on students’ perceptions of feedback and the contribution feedback makes to students’ learning and teaching. This reported qualitative study aims to enrich our understanding of these perceptions and importantly to provide insight into the meaning of ‘effective’ when related to feedback. The study involved four focus groups of undergraduate students of varying levels and from a range of Schools completing degrees in the Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Sydney. Students’ perceptions relating to a definition of feedback, how they use it and preferences for delivery were prompted by the facilitators. Thematic analysis resulted in three key dimensions: perceptions of feedback, impact of feedback and credibility of feedback. The analysis demonstrated that effectiveness of feedback extends beyond mode of delivery and timeliness to include the credibility of the lecturer giving the feedback. The role of effective feedback includes not only enhancing learning and teaching but also facilitating the transition between school and university.
Attention has recently focused on sectoral concern with assessment and feedback as a result of the National Student Survey. Government, the higher education agencies and the NUS have called for urgent action to address this concern. Existing data from institutional student feedback surveys, using the Student Satisfaction Approach, some dating back well over a decade, shows that the issue is not a new one. Indeed, several institutions have been addressing student concerns and as a result, have seen student satisfaction increase.
This paper explores the existing student feedback data in order to identify not only how students' perceptions of assessment and feedback have changed over time but also the main concerns of students and institutions and what action has been taken by institutions to increase satisfaction.
Several main concerns emerge from the data. Students value feedback as it is re‐assuring as an indication of their progress and that it should be timely. Institutions that have used the Student Satisfaction Approach are concerned to clarify their processes to students, to increase their own efficiency in returning work, to monitor and review their assessment and feedback régimes and to share good practice, both internally and externally. Action taken as a result of listening to the student voice results in increased satisfaction but this can take several years.