This section discusses the modern trends commonly found in HE institutions which impact on the provision of quality feedback delivered within acceptable timeframes. It examines increases in student numbers since the turn of the millennium, and the perceptions of modern students collected by surveys from around the world.
1.4.1 Student numbers in the new millennium
Much of the literature on feedback discusses how the workload of marking student work exceeds the time available to staff, with such phrases as ‘increased staff work load due to increased student numbers’ (Higgins et al. 2002; Lunt and Curran 2010; Haxton and McGarvey 2011; Crook et al. 2012; Jones et al. 2012; Evans 2013; Orsmond et al. 2013; McCarthy 2015; Mayhew 2016). In the UK this is no longer a new phenomenon.
Numbers of students entering HE were significantly and continuously increasing from at least 2000 to 2012 (see Figure 1.1, or for more detail, see Appendix A.1 and Appendix A.2 for the original figures and graph respectively). However, since the introduction of students paying £9,000 fees in 2012 numbers have declined, although there is still a net gain between academic years 2000-2001 and 2016-2017 of 225,060 students on
undergraduate courses (14.6%) and 369,745 on all courses (18.98%), but these figures had peaked at 2,503,010 students in total, an increase of 554,875 or 28.48% since the start of the millennium (HESA 2018).
Figure 1.1: Increase in Student numbers entering Higher Education since the start of the millennium in the UK.
Whilst teaching allows for increases in economies of scale, such as extra chairs in rooms, this is not so easily achieved in assessment and feedback. Most assessment costs increase in proportion with student numbers and staff find themselves spending a lot of their time marking (Gibbs and Simpson 2005). Deadlines are further squeezed
when academic units are scheduled into more intensive but shorter blocks, such as semesters.
The modern shift towards semesterisation, or modularisation, exacerbates the problems of timely feedback delivery to students. Short course durations can mean teaching and assessment has to occur within a 10 to 12 week block (Gibbs and Simpson 2005) Feedback may not be returned to students until after the end of the course (Heywood 2000; Lunt and Curran 2010), at which point opportunities to feed forward new learning may be severely limited (Boud and Falchikov 2007; Marriott and Lim Keong 2012), as students move on to new subjects (Bailey and Garner 2010). Therefore returning feedback as soon as possible after assignment submission is vital (Higgins et al. 2002). Otherwise, for many, but not all students, that is an opportunity to learn that is lost (Hounsell et al. 2008). Fitting in more than one assessment, or formative feedback on a draft prior to assessment, can seem impossible with high student numbers on short time frames.
1.4.2 Student perceptions of assessment and feedback
Large scale student surveys are a source of student perceptions regarding assessment and feedback. In the UK the National Student Survey is taken by final year
undergraduate students as a collective judgment on their course experience. It is the current benchmark by which prospective students measure the quality of courses at HEI’s and being high up in the table is a positive selling point. Therefore, improving results are the focus of much effort by staff. Similarly, in Australia there is the Course Experience Questionnaire (CEQ), and similarly, the National Student Survey of Engagement in the USA.
As might be expected, the NSS score regarding the ‘teaching on my course’ follows that of ‘overall satisfaction’ very closely (see Figure 1.2) , however, it is often pointed out that the score for ‘assessment and feedback’ sits well below both of these questions every year (Handley et al. 2007; Crook et al. 2012; Marriott and Lim Keong 2012; Carruthers et al. 2014a; Chew 2014; Mayhew 2016). Note that there was a change of format to the published data. From 2005 values were published for individual questions. From 2009 an additional summary value was published for the scales of questions. From 2014 onward, the values for individual questions were dropped and only the summary per scale values are available. In Figure 1.2 satisfaction overall and satisfaction with teaching are shown by broken lines, and questions and scales related to assessment
and feedback are shown in solid lines.
The National Union of Students (NUS) said the fact that ‘assessment and feedback stuck out like a sore thumb among the good results is a cause for concern’ (Williams et al. 2008). The fact that HE institutions were looking in to it, and had been for some time (Crook et al. 2012), was evidence that the problem was not easily solved (Williams et al. 2008). What is less frequently mentioned, is that with the efforts of concerned staff, the gap is gradually closing. This can be seen when comparing the NSS scores for ‘overall satisfaction’ and ‘teaching on my course’ to ‘assessment and feedback’ (see Figure 1.2). Indeed, Figure 1.2 demonstrates a trend towards improved feedback as perceived by students, when compared to earlier years, showing improvement on every question within the assessment and feedback scale.
For comparison, in Australia, the Course Experience Questionnaire (CEQ) was designed with similar wording in some questions to the UK NSS for bench marking purposes, including the overall satisfaction question. The results show Australian students are more likely to rate the quality of their experience as lower than their counterparts in the UK and USA. Unlike the NSS which has a separate scale for assessment and feedback, the CEQ includes two questions in the ‘Quality of Teaching’ scale, indicating the inextricable relationship between quality of teaching and
assessment and feedback. The results for the ‘Quality of Teaching’ has remained in a 4% range (79-82%) in the first 5 years since the survey began, and the during the same time period ‘Overall Satisfaction’ has varied by only 1% (79-80%), both elements
indicating no significant change (QILT 2016).
The National Student Survey of Engagement in the USA similarly places the two questions about feedback under the theme ‘Effective Teaching Practices’, which
contains only 5 questions in total. The focus of this survey is to ask students to reflect on their own engagement, as opposed to asking for their opinion on quality, making results on assessment and feedback incomparable. (NSSE 2017).
Given that the average undergraduate student has now grown up with connected
technology in all aspects of their life, the sizeable gap in perspective between many staff and the majority of students must be acknowledged. Known commonly as ‘Digital Natives’ (Prensky 2001), ‘Generation z’ or the ‘iGeneration’, the ‘post-millennial’
Figure 1.2: NSS results, shown by scales and questions, for the whole of the UK - overall course satisfaction compared to assessment and feedback (Higher Education
a comfortable and familiar means of communication in their commonly technology enriched lives (Jones et al. 2012). Therefore the use of technology for interaction with students on all levels, should be under consideration by academics (Carruthers et al. 2014b), and should be under constant review to keep up to date. With VLE’s now common place in HE the student expectation for all communication to be digital is high.
Previously technology in a work environment has been all about efficiency and achieving objectives. Now the majority of students are also comfortable with projecting a sense of themselves through social media, creating a social presence in a virtual place, and communicating with other virtual profiles (White and Cornu 2011). Prensky (2001) describes “Digital Natives” as those who have grown up in the digital age, while the older generation attempt to adapt to a digital world with varying degrees of success as “Digital Immigrants”. The main issue in education is the differing perceptions between these two groups.
“Our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language.” (Prensky, 2001)
Having updated Prensky’s 2001 “Digital Native” methodology, White and Cornu (2011) describe the level to which people are comfortable with technology embedded into their life as somewhere on a continuum between ‘residents’ and ‘visitors’. While most
students now sit in, or very close to, the ‘residents’ end, the staff that teach them may be anything in the range all the way to a ‘visitor’ furthest from the students. A ‘visitor’, far from someone who is computer illiterate, is described as someone who happily uses computers as tools to do a job but does not accept that there is requirement for a social media profile. The problem is, students expect their seniors to be just as comfortable and effective in a virtual world as they are.