Students and Staff Improving Feedback Together

Dr Tansy Jessop is the Head of Learning and Teaching at the University of Winchester. She leads the ‘Transforming the Experience of Students through Assessment’ (TESTA) National Teaching Fellowship Project, which has spread to more than 50 universities in the UK, Australia, India and the USA. She developed the ‘proof of concept’ for the Student Fellows Scheme at Winchester through her management of the JISC-funded project, ‘FASTECH’. At Winchester, sixty Student Fellows work in partnership with staff on educational research and innovation projects. Tansy began her career as a secondary school teacher in South Africa, completing a PhD on teacher development in rural KwaZulu-Natal. She has published on social justice, narrative inquiry, learning spaces and assessment and feedback. View Tansy's profile at http://winchester.academia.edu/TansyJessop

Abstract

The challenge of feedback design: evidence, principles, action
This central question which this session poses is about the failure of attempts to improve feedback, and the persistent problem of feedback missing the mark. Massive resources are invested in feedback, but students report frustration and confusion in the face of poor feedback. This session reflects on student perspectives of feedback from thirty degree programmes in more than a dozen universities in the UK and two in India, gathered through the ‘Transforming the Experience of Students through Assessment’ (TESTA) project. TESTA has highlighted the challenge of feedback design in modular systems where the system enables piecemeal, episodic and ‘final word’ feedback. Isolated feedback constitutes broken links in a chain, which institutional enhancement and self-improvement tactics often fail to address because these ignore the silo effect of modules. Using data from TESTA, this paper will argue for connected feedback design, which articulates the principles of dialogic, relational, accountable and growth-oriented feedback across whole programmes of study. Within the discussion, the broader educational paradigms within which feedback operates, will be explored.