Hi everyone!
I’m Louise, a third year Psychology student and member of
the SALT F3EDBACK team. You hopefully have seen us in the foyer of the
Student’s Union this week offering free biscuits and sweets, in return for your
opinions on feedback at the University of Sheffield. First of all, on behalf of
the F3EDBACK team, I would like to thank you for your engagement with the
project so far, we had so many interesting conversations with people about
their feedback experiences and had a great questionnaire response. The success
of the F3EDBACK stall in the union will definitely help steer the future of
this project. This blog post will summarise some
of the interesting and important things we encountered on the stall whilst
interacting with you. I will also explain what we plan to do next and how
you can continue to get involved.
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| F3EDBACK for US hits the SU |
Most of you who walked past our stall put a counter in the voting
station which asked; “How do you rate your experience of feedback at the
university of Sheffield". Interestingly, the majority of the counters
were in the ‘Satisfactory’ or ‘Poor’ boxes, which means that we have a lot of
work to do! However, we did notice that a lot of the students who put counters
in the ‘Good’ box were from the faculty of Science and Engineering. It will be
interesting to talk to the students and staff to find out what is so good about
the feedback in these departments, which maybe the humanities departments are
missing.
Voting Station Results:
How do you rate feedback at the University of Sheffield?
Good: 85
Satisfactory: 68
Poor: 28
Also, many students we spoke to didn’t realise that the
university has a 3 week policy for returning and giving feedback for work
submitted. A lot of you said that your department definitely did not stick to
this policy and some didn't receive feedback until months after they had
submitted their work or taken exams. This is something we feel it is essential
to look into, as lots of you expressed that the timing of your feedback was
really important to you.
Obviously,
at particular times of the year staff are inundated with exam scripts and
coursework to mark, consequently a quick turn around with feedback isn't always
possible. The next thing on our checklist therefore, will be to speak to staff
within departments across the university and find out what they have to say
about giving feedback. Hopefully, by considering both staff and student perspectives on feedback at
university, we can meet the needs of everyone with the improvements we intend
to make.
Whilst on the stall, myself and Stuart had an interesting
chat with a member of CiCS. He explained to us that there were numerous ways
that staff can give electronic feedback, however from our experiences these technologies are not widely used. We hope to find out more about electronic feedback by talking
to CiCS about the available resources. This is an exciting opportunity that may help to improve the accessibility, timing and legibility of
feedback.
What can you do now?
To follow up the hundreds of questionnaires that we’ve
gratefully received from you we will be holding a focus group next Friday (29th
November) 1-2pm in the IC. There will be FREE PIZZA! So if you would like to
give just an hour of your time to chat to us about feedback and stuff your
faces with free food please get in touch. After this, we plan to approach you again after you have received feedback from your January exams and deadlines.
By hearing your opinions before you’ve received feedback and after you’ve received
feedback, we hope to find out what’s missing and bridge the gap with a
miraculous solution. In the meantime, we
will be behind the scenes talking to departmental staff and CiCS about their
opinions on feedback.
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