a prime purpose of formative feedback was to enable students to become more proficient self-assessors; the relevance of active self-engagement with feedback is continually being advocated (Orsmond and Merry, 2011). In an article entitled ‘Beyond feedback’, Sadler (2010) argues that simply ‘telling students about criteria, standards and what is expected in terms of assessment performance is as problematic as telling them about the quality of their work in the hope they will improve it. Feed forward must represent more than a set of published guidelines, or a teacher’s extensive verbal communication about assessment task specifications and /or criteria. But, as Sadler (2010) explains, the process of making judgements about the relative worth of work is a complex one. He goes on to say students need a sounding working knowledge of three concepts in particular task compliance, quality and criteria (Sambell, 2011).
Dialogue
Arguably large-class sizes and cost-restricted teaching and learning have contributed too many of the difficulties with assessment feedback identified above and the consequent dissatisfaction expressed by staff and students alike. Building upon pedagogical theorists who place dialogue at the centre of pedagogy (Bakhtin in Sambell, 2011) define dialogue in its widest sense: interactions in a participative process that develop meanings and understandings - whether generated through the historical practice of written feedback and using this as a stepping stone to opening dialogue, or if a more clearly stated process is
used to formalise feedback as a face-to-face discussion. Building upon pedagogical theorists who place dialogue at the Centre of Pedagogy (Bakhtin in Matusov, 2004, and Laurillard, 2002) dialogue is defined in its widest sense: interactions in a participative process that develop meanings and understandings - whether generated through the historical practice of written feedback and using this as a stepping stone to opening dialogue, or if a more clearly stated process is used to formalise feedback as a face-to-face discussion. Two broad approaches have been taken to dialogic feedback within the literature: enhancing written feedback and building opportunities for oral feedback back into Higher Education teaching. Bloxham and Campbell (2010) looked for opportunities to support tutor-student dialogue, within written feedback and without adding to workload. The interactive cover sheet (ICS) was introduced, where students were asked to identify the aspects of the assessment that they would like feedback on. This was intended to prompt dialogue, but also led to identifying the limitations of students’ understanding of what they were being asked to do, with first year students in particular appearing to ‘… struggle to frame questions about the more complex or abstract elements of their work…’ (p. 299). As such this approach afforded staff the opportunity to rectify student misunderstandings. Nicol (2010) also focuses on written feedback, suggesting that to support student learning dialogue should be re-instated within the feedback process. To achieve this written feedback should be dialogical in character, rich in detail, adaptive to student needs
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