Assessment & feedback – links from the Joint Faculty E-Learning Forum
By Mira Vogel, on 20 November 2014
This morning UCL’s Joint Faculty E-Learning Forum – that’s Arts & Humanities and Social & Historical Sciences – met for the second time. The first meeting had focused on assessment and feedback, so ELE gave a brief presentation on our actions since then and recommended avenues colleagues in departments could pursue.
This post provides some resources to support those, which you can also find in the presentation from the meeting below.
Student engagement with assessment feedback
Our discussions with students suggested low awareness of feedback release dates and our investigations revealed patchy engagement with feedback.
- What can we find out about student engagement with feedback? Turnitin provides some basic information to staff about student engagement with feedback. Each assignment inbox has a student response column containing either a dot (no engagement) or in the case of students who reviewed their graded paper in GradeMark for longer than 30 seconds, an icon of a person with a check mark. For a fuller picture of how long it takes students to visit their feedback, check more than once – for example, one day, one week and one month after feedback is released. Moodle Assignment has a different process: in each assignment’s Settings block, click Logs and filter actions by View.
- Since Moodle and Turnitin don’t alert the students automatically, it’s important to use the News Forum or other communication channel to draw students’ attention to feedback when it becomes available.
- ELE have guidance for Moodle Assignment on how to delay providing a numeric mark, to encourage students to engage with feedback. With Turnitin this cannot be done as a bulk process, though there are workarounds.
- Turnitin UserVoice and Moodle Tracker are available for users to contribute and vote for ideas (to create an account on Turnitin UserVoice, enter your UCL email and you should get an option to create account). For example, on Turnitin UserVoice see ‘Feedback released prior to grades’, with a corresponding item on the Moodle Tracker. Do contribute your ideas and votes.
- The solution to low engagement may lie in rethinking assessment design so as to incorporate dialogue about earlier feedback. Jisc has gathered assessment and feedback principles and provides support for the design of assessment such as the University Of Ulster’s Viewpoints. Where there is anonymous submission, ELE has guidance on Turnitin aligned with the marking policy which enables you to lift anonymity between marking and external examining, so as to enable dialogue with students. We are in the process of preparing corresponding guidance for Moodle Assignment.
External examining
- See M09 – Collecting & Marking assignments in Moodle (UCL Moodle Resource Centre) for how to give external examiners access, including access to still-anonymous marked student submissions.
Efficiency gains? Efficiency losses?
- See Supporting assessment and feedback practice with technology: from tinkering to transformation – Jisc’s Assessment & Feedback Programme synthesis report from 2013.
Advocacy with third party software providers
- Towards a consensus on priorities and actions, get involved with Jisc’s Electronic Management of Assessment project between now and August 2015. They need help from different groups of users to develop ‘user personas‘.
- To view the top 10 and top 20 priorities generated by the consultation so far, see this October 2014 blogpost from the project.