Transcript for Unit 2 Podcast
In this unit we are looking at assessment and the kind of feedback you can give, and particularly feedback you can give online.
Receiving positive feedback is really important if you are considering how students are going to learn. It's a strange thing assessment, because on the one hand it seems that it is going to provide some kind of final positive, recognisable limit or way of measuring the achievement of somebody's learning and that is why we give some kind of grade to work. In a way this encourages the kind of feedback that says, 'Well done, you've achieved that and let's see what you can do next.' That's summative feedback - feedback that measures someone's work against a level that is identifiable and communicable to them and towards which they can strive. But assessment is also about learning. It is about accompanying the students on their learning journey, towards a certain kind of learning outcomes which are embedded in the course, as well as learning as a person.
So if you take the view that assessment is something which underpins learning. It doesn't just measure it, it actually identifies for a student what is important, what is important to strive for, what is important to develop so that it can be achieved, so you see what your targets are and when you have got there. If you see it that way, as something which is actually fundamentally embedded in the learning process, then you move beyond the idea of recognising a finite measureable achievement (with a '56% Well done'), and you move into a different sort of realm where assessment is about development, where feedback of someone's learning that helps them develop further and it becomes a sort of dialogue between you the assessor, tutor and the students. I think that online this kind of dialogue is more achievable even than in person.
It is possible to engage students in developmental tasks, whether it is the wiki they put together, where they adding knowledge and thoughts and dialogue into a composite product, or whether they are working together and discussing something and working together and producing something, like a powerpoint. You are asked to do something similar on this course, where together you are asked to discuss the issues to do with learning, assessment and feedback and the problems and then put a powerpoint together, and that's your asssessment. Or an individual piece of work where somebody researchers, engages with a specific question, gathers the evidence, develops the argument and puts together a coherent project that is assessed. Whatever form the assessment takes, the feedback in each instance, I think, should be about development. It is about learning from what you just did, so that next time you can do even better, so you can embed what you have learnt from this activity, as a learner yourself. It is not about putting a lid on someone's learning.
Feedback, seems to me, whether it's about an individual's learning and the assessment process that measures that or group learning putting together a peer presentation, it's all about learning. It shouldn't just measure, it should enable, encourage learning. One of the notions about feedback is the notion of feedforward, which means that in the way in which you make comment as a tutor on students learning, you are making comments which suggest what they can do next, how they might develop. Not putting a lid on, not limiting, talking about them as developmental learners, suggesting what they might do next, so feedback is essential part of learning process. How can we do that kind of feedback when working with online learners you might never meet? How can we engaged in a dialogue with them so we can get them to think, 'I did it this way, how does that task relate to the learning outcomes? How can I make it better, so that I really understand it more? So that I can believe that I am contributing more? So that I can use the skills, attitudes, values, beliefs in the future in my own work?'
If we believe assessment is a tool to enable students to learn and identify their learning needs and learning outcomes, and plan a developmental journal through their learning and the feedback is geared both to the generalities of what you expect someone to have learnt at that level, at that point and to the individual development of that individual student, so they are getting some insight about what they are good at and what they need to do to get better. If you believe that it is about a learning journey, then probably there is an issue to do with the language we use in assessment, so it is not a language of finite measurement, it becomes a language which promotes thought. It's a language which is about questioning things, entering into a dialogue, 'Could you do this? What about that?'. It's about providing models of other people's work who have engaged in critical thinking or cognitive development, where you can say 'Look, somebody here has engaged this way, and have expressed it this way, might you use this kind of model in your own work?'
There is a kind of provocative questioning, an interrogative discourse that attaches to feedback which is not about limiting what they said 'Well done, you got 62%' but 'You did this, well done. How did you do that? How could you do this next? What might you do?', so that you are encouraging critical thinking and moving on, so that assessment and feedback then are not about lids, not about a stuck achievement, but make suggestions about development, whether that's for an individual or for a group, and measured against the learning outcomes of the particular piece of learning which is being assessed. But it doesn't stop with that particularly piece of learning, it's also about them as a person learning to do things better, learning to do things better and reflecting on that learning. So feedback encourages reflection on that learning. Asking for evidence and impact and suggesting movements forward.
In terms of this unit on this course, I wonder what you think about what assessment and feedback does in your own subject area. How might you could enable your students through a dialogue? What do you do to enable students to learn from assessment so they become more aware learners that move beyond the module you are doing with them on. So they become reflective learners, active learners? What do you do in that respect? Part of the assessment on this unit is about that engagement and the language you use, and I've tried to model some of that.
I wonder, when we do these posts to each and you engage as a group on this unit, what you think and how useful that might have been.
Thank you for listening.
Gina Wisker, recorded October 2010
