Assessment Dialogues: Perceptions of Feedback and Feed-Forward
Carless (Stud Higher Educ 31(2):219–233, 2006 ) recommended ‘assessment dialogues’ to reduce tutors’ and students’ different perceptions of feedback. Written feedback and feed-forward on assessments are a form of dialogue. While this communication is impo
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Abstract Carless (Stud Higher Educ 31(2):219–233, 2006) recommended ‘assessment dialogues’ to reduce tutors’ and students’ different perceptions of feedback. Written feedback and feed-forward on assessments are a form of dialogue. While this communication is important, so too are assessment dialogues between subject coordinators, tutors and assessment experts. A case study of a large-enrolment, first-year subject is a vehicle for the assessment dialogues. The assessment design is described along with an innovation in which students reflected on their academic writing for their first written assessment and, for their second, reflected on the feedback and feed-forward they received on their first. The first assessment dialogue involved the subject coordinator, an academic learning advisor and students and centres on designing and explicating the syllabus, particularly the assessments. The second assessment dialogue was between the academic learning advisor, tutors and the subject coordinator, focusing on the development and refinement of a feedback/feed-forward comment bank for content and academic writing, which was derived from the analyses of past feedback and feed-forward. The third and final dialogue was between tutors (markers) and students and an analysis of students’ interpretations of feedback and feed-forward. It is concluded that there are challenges to the provision of effective feedback and feed-forward for student learning, but dialogues informed by data and theory are effective for gaining traction. In the current context, the bigger picture is to align assessment design, feedback and feed-forward to the first-year transition agenda.
T. Griffin (&) L. Armitage P. Parker S. Hugman School of Social Sciences and Psychology, Western Sydney University, Sydney, Australia e-mail: t.griffi[email protected] L. Armitage e-mail: [email protected] P. Parker e-mail: [email protected] S. Hugman e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2016 S.F. Tang and L. Logonnathan (eds.), Assessment for Learning Within and Beyond the Classroom, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-0908-2_20
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Keywords Assessment design Assessment dialogues feed-forward Tutor professional development
Effective feedback and
1 Introduction ‘Greater Western Sydney’, with a population of just over two million, is the fastest growing and most culturally diverse region of Australia. Western Sydney University has six campuses dispersed across the region, and our 45,000 students reflect its cultural diversity. Sixty per cent of students are the first generation in their family to attend university. The widening participation agenda at many Australian universities lifts the imperative to get assessments right, to assess for learning (rather than of learning) and to ensure that students are afforded opportunities to develop their capacity for academic writing (Gill 2015). Ensuring best and consistent practice is particularly important for first-year students (Burnett
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