Purpose of feedback

“The simplest prescription for improving education must be dollops of feedback…. providing information about what a student does and does not understand, and what direction the student must take to improve” (Hattie, 1999, p. 11).

Formative feedback brings out qualitative aspects of the learning process. As formative assessment produces an increase in student study time, increases familiarity with learning materials, exposure to the style of summative examination material they will meet and develop familiarity with the testing process (Bell & Cowie, 2001; Jacoby, et al., 2013). Feedback from online formative work allows the learner to gauge their performance immediately after the assessment is completed (Cassady & Gridley, 2005). From this feedback, the student can make adjustments to improve future performance a process often

in their learning process when feedback is presented in a timely manner. Student performance is enhanced with the immediate feedback provided by virtual learning environments, and the ability for students to see the result of their efforts in their achievement. The impact of formative feedback is strongly associated with retention of information (Yorke, 2003; Cherem, 2011). The concept of built-in electronic, continuous assessment enables lecturers to provide instantaneous feedback; this idea is supported by Bojanić et al. (2009), where, they identified the advantages of continuous assessment to student performance. The feedback must focus on quality and provide positive feed- forward rather than a mass of information gathered by lecturers, with no student benefit (Cherem, 2011).

Additionally formative assessments allow tutors to review and revise individual student performances and identify larger scale problems concerning student learning. All feedback needs to always be timely, whether the assessment is formative or summative. Ideally the learner will be able to gauge their performance immediately after the assessment was taken. The adjustments that the learner must make to improve performance are more engaging when feedbacks are presented in a timely manner (Juwah, Macfarlane-Dick, Matthew, Nicol, Ross, & Smith, 2004). Hounsell (2007) has described formative feedback as a more effective method than summative feedback methods for improving student performance. It is in the learning outcome that the formative feedback is distinct from summative feedback (Smith & Gorard, 2005): the latter is more concerned with transfer of knowledge, whereas the former is also concerned with retention. Formative feedback adds more to the teaching process than just

knowledge transferred to the learner. For example, a mnemonic when learnt becomes engraved deep into the learner's memory to make later access and retrieval from memory of the material easier. Emotion-related retrieval cues have been shown to be more efficacious due to a more immediate way by which formative feedback is provided (Cassady & Gridley, 2005; Ehrlinger & Dunning, 2003).

Feedback has been linked with self-regulated learning by way of formative assessment (Nicol & Macfarlane-Dick, 2006). Self-regulation implies that the student/learner adjust accordingly based on the corrections received through feedback. The essence of formative assessment is that not only does it engage the student in the learning process, but also provide immediate corrective feedback (Gikandi, 2011). Hence, formative assessment is deemed fit as better suited for distance or online learning wherein student motivation can be difficult to follow. Formative feedback compensates for the lack of grades (Smith & Gorard, 2005) with the timely evaluation of performance. The students are much better able to cope with the learning process with direct comments as to how they could improve or do better, self-regulation (Gikandi, 2011). Numerical scores, on the other hand, must first be interpreted with respect to a grade scale in order to make sense to the student. Moreover, numerical marks can be misleading especially that some teachers expect higher standards than others (Cassady & Gridley, 2005; Gikandi, 2011).

However, despite the increasing body of literature many HE institutions maintain summative assessments as the only form of feedback used. The reason is that formative feedback are more challenging to design because of the effectiveness element that must be considered in addition to the knowledge transfer (Cherem, 2011). On the other hand, summative feedback has been made standard in the form of written test types. An extra amount of added value is also seen in formative feedback, enhancing the student's feelings to a point where they are in a more prepared position to engage with their learning experience (Cherem, 2011).

5.1.4.1 University policy on feedback

LondonMet policy states students should receive feedback on their coursework submitted within three weeks of submission. This process has inherent issues; the work may take a week to be released from the assessment unit (personally experienced worst case was five weeks after submission), the work needs to be first and second marked by tutors (rotating 150+ scripts can be time consuming and logistically difficult to process). Work is taken to tutorials for redistribution, when not collected it is then taken to the school office for retrieval (approximately 90% is never retrieved based on 8 years personal experience). An ‘in-class’ review of coursework feeds back the main positives and weaknesses of the whole cohorts’ work are delivered to the entire class. Furthermore, the National Student Survey reveals that students do not appreciate that they have received feedback (http://www.hefce.ac.uk/whatwedo/lt/publicinfo/nss/) Figure 5.1. The School of Human Sciences has recognised this lack of understanding as a weakness and therefore has introduced a series of points

where feedback processes and forms are explained to students regularly. Therefore, the utilisation of an electronic feedback system will deliver the material to the student directly and will allow tutors the opportunity to determine who has not accessed the material, enabling them to engage with the feedback process. The form use in this action research study involves immediate feedback on completion of each question answered by the student.

Figure 5.1 Satisfaction scores for each National Student Survey question scale over the last nine years of the use of survey tool (HEFCE, 2014). The graph shows that even though there is a year-on-year improvement of student responses to satisfaction with the assessment and feedback questions in the national student survey it is out and out the weakest area for degree cohorts.