When less is more:Students’ experiences of assessment feedback

Student dissatisfaction with feedback has been a prominent feature of the National Student Survey for the past two years. In the 2006 survey, 49% of respondents said that feedback was slow and unhelpful, prompting Bill Rammell, the Higher Education Minister, to say in response that he hoped institutions would ‘look long and hard at assessment and feedback’ (Shepherd, THES, 2006). This dissatisfaction is all the more disturbing given the prominence of feedback in pedagogic theory: as Laurillard (1993, p. 61) has said, 'action without feedback is completely unproductive for the learner'. This principle applies throughout our lives as well as in educational settings: we use intrinsic and extrinsic feedback to guide our actions and the development of our thoughts, values and ways-of-being. Whether practitioners adopts a neo-behaviourist, cognitivist, socio-constructivist or postmodern perspective on learning, feedback has a central role to play: as
reinforcement; as information from which to correct 'errors'; as guidance on sociallyconstructed standards; or as an indicator of appropriate discourse (Askew and Lodge, 2000; Fenwick, 2000). Feedback is essential to our lifelong development but its importance is perhaps greatest (and most visible) during periods of formal education: at these times, students are primed to expect assessment feedback from knowledgeable others, and to develop skills of self-assessment for themselves.

Students want .................https://mw.brookes.ac.uk/download/attachments/2851502/HEA+paper+2007+-+Student+experiences+of+assessment+feedback.pdf?version=1