Assessment Feedback using Comment Banks: New Methods Jeff Bray Dr. Miguel moital School of Services Management Education Enhancement Conference 2009 Continuing to Enhance the Student Experience Bournemouth University, 21 May 2009

Assessment: What’s the Point? Enables tutor to ‘Grade’ performance Distinguish between students We have to Provide feedback and learning opportunity to the students

Assessment: What’s the Point? Formative Assessment Summative Assessment

Role of Assessment Feedback “It is through feedback of assessment that many of it’s functions are performed” Nicol et al. 1994

Role of Assessment Feedback “…feedback resulted in positive benefits on learning and achievement across all areas” Black and Wiliam’(1998)

Reality Check! What do our students do with the feedback? Read it Annotate it to gain further understanding Seek clarification when not clear Refer back when submitting future work

Reality Check! What do our students do with the feedback? Throw it “In my first and second year I never really read the feedback, I was only interested in the mark” Final Year Retail Student

Good and Bad Practice Good Focused around positive statements – provides ideas about what could be improved Clearly written in an accessible manner A depth of individual feedback is provided Supplemented with in-text annotation Generates OWNERSHIP of feedback

Good and Bad Practice Bad Illegible Hand written Written in pencil Generic “doesn’t appear to apply to MY work” Unclear – contradictory Solely negative comments Demotivational…

It’s a tough job! How can we most efficiently deliver this high standard of feedback? Spend hours doing it? Not an option & certainly not the answer I set out to find

Alternative Approaches Generic – tick box approach Highly time efficient Provides a high degree of objectivity Students can clearly see what they need to do in order to progress Provides clear justification for the mark

But… Does not generate the ‘ownership’ sought Lacks depth and capacity to really articulate the key issues Crude

Comment Banks We do find repetition in our comments Each comment can be carefully constructed to ensure they outline possible improvement

Construction Based upon previous years’ feedback Both general and customised feedback Briefly demo the two different methods of construction followed by discussion. Excel Waypoint (via MyBU) ameset.jsphttps://mybu.bournemouth.ac.uk/webapps/portal/fr ameset.jsp

WayPoint My experience - Much more (10 times more & more quality?) feedback using the same time Entering data is easy (generating the bank of comments may not) Around 6 hours to learn and set up the system (initial investment) More enjoyable Not time saving at the beginning, but as they experience grew, I became more efficient

WayPoint Basic usage – some benefits not realised (e.g. Send feedback forms via to students) Much of the initial investment is done Learning how to use the software Constructing a fairly complete bank of comments

Any Questions