Assessment and Feedback session

Questions• What do you regard as a good assessment?

• How can technology enhance assessment?

• What do you regard as good feedback?

• Do students engage with it?

• Is the current technology offering enough to help with feedback?

• What would you like technology to offer around assessment feedback?

What do you regard as a good assessment?• Captures different levels of performance from excellent

to a clear fail.• Captures student attention and effort.• Closely linked to skills and knowledge you want

students to obtain (learning outcomes).• Requires time input proportionate to its value.

How can technology enhance assessment?

• Efficient marking.• Rapid feedback.• Enables more interesting and authentic assessment

than can be done on pen and paper (exams in computer rooms).• Can be done in students own time and place.• Can enable independent learning and independent

generation of feedback.

What do you regard as good feedback?First we should define what we mean by feedback. Ultimately feedback is only information and then it is only ‘ever’ good in any sense if the student does something with it.GOOD FEEDBACK IS INFORMATION WHICH STUDENTS REFLECT UPON AND USE TO IMPROVE THEIR SKILLS.Perhaps a more important point is, what sort of information can students make the most use off? That of course depends upon the student and the scenario.Good feedback is student led because then it is tailored to their

individual need and student desire to make use of it.

Do students engage with feedback?

Don’t waste your time producing what the students do not want or will not use. They must be proactive in this process.

Make feedback available to students who actively seek it out.

Is the current technology offering enough to help with feedback?

• Technology is good at facilitating independent generation of feedback, for example through quizzes, forums, chat rooms, web searches, software tools and so forth.• This enables students to take charge of their own learning

needs and also reduces the time pressure on staff to produce copious written feedback (often of little real value) that few students would use effectively.

The bigger issues are:1. staff awareness and promotion of the tools.2. students acceptance, effect use of and recognition of

all the feedback available.

What would you like technology to offer around assessment feedback?

• My main request is would be some form of voice activated software that enabled staff to look at a student document on the screen and edit or mark this by a combination of a some form of screen enabled pen (circle a point) and an audio capture system. • Currently ‘feedback software’ is still some what archaic in

being mouse driven and somewhat clumsy/slow to use.• It is a lot easier to speak feedback than to write it.• Audio tools in general could be integrated into MOLE much

better, for example in the discussions board, so staff can talk to a microphone and this is linked to the discussion with no need for other software, sign in, saving files, etc.

Session Feedback

We would welcome your feedback on this session, via this URL

http://goo.gl/ReRYkH

Thank you