Feedback Expectations - Headline Findings

The F3 Project team captured the opinions of level one students before their first experiences of summative university feedback using an online and paper survey (n=288, 6.3% of new entrants) and small group interviews (n=28, conducted in student residences and focus groups). The headline findings were as follows:

1. Level one students have a sophisticated appreciation of the multiple roles of feedback at university that is strongly associated with improvement, but not limited to grade.

Student Ambassadors for Learning and Teaching Report: 

‘Although grades are important to students, feedback is not exclusively used by students as a gateway to high grades. It seems students also feel that feedback can help them to understand how their work has been marked, and subsequently what that mark says about how they have expressed their ideas and methods. Results suggest that students believe feedback can enhance the ongoing learning process that they are engaged with when completing their degree.’

Student quotations:

• ‘A clear and honest opinion of my approach to the given coursework, identification of my strengths and weaknesses, as well as practical improvements which I may make in the future.’ 
• ‘A means of improvement where I can hear about where I went wrong. But also a chance to hear what I am doing correctly so I can do it consistently.’

 2. Level one students perceive university feedback to be less detailed, less personal and less readily available than school feedback.

Student Ambassadors for Learning and Teaching Report: 

‘The key differences between university and school that were viewed most negatively were: The level of detail of feedback received; the number of opportunities available for students to receive feedback; the personalised aspect of feedback; the amount of one to one feedback that was received. 139 negative comments were made about university feedback compared with just 34 positive comments.’

Student quotations:

• ‘At school, feedback is available more frequently and on a more personal level. University feedback is more formal.’ 
• ‘[feedback] isn't presented to you as obviously - you have to seek it out. At school it is almost forced onto you.’

 3. A significant proportion of students aren’t getting, or don’t know that they are getting, sufficient advice on how to use feedback at university.

Student Ambassadors for Learning and Teaching Report: 

‘The data strongly suggests that students do not perceive that they are getting appropriate and sufficient advice on using university feedback. 49.3% of students identify that they are receiving either no advice or very little advice on making the most of the feedback they are given.’

Student quotations:

• ‘It seems to be them telling us to note given feedback, that everything they do is a form of feedback, and not a lot of individualised, what I'd term 'proper', feedback.’ 
• ‘Nothing much has been given. Mainly just an email or link on MOLE showing the marking criteria.’
  

 4. A blended approach combining elements of written and oral feedback appears to be valued by students as a way to understand and use feedback effectively.

For 78.8% of level one students written feedback is considered to be effective or very effective, while 76.3% consider oral feedback from a teacher to be effective or very effective. 69.5% rate both written and oral feedback as effective or very effective.  Comments suggest that many students expect feedback to be delivered as part of a process including generic or individual written feedback followed up by face-to-face support on interpreting and using it. 

Student quotations:

• ‘Receiving written/oral word from the lecturer/tutor about my work; what was well done, what was poorly done, why I received the mark/grade given, what I can do to improve to reach a higher mark/grade’ 
• ‘Receiving comments on essays or other work handed in and graded, discussing the grades with a member of staff (e.g. tutor)’

5. A significant number of level one students feel that limited access to personal, one-to-one feedback from a university tutor a particular challenge of the transition to HE.

Lack of personal or individual feedback and lack of one-to-one feedback were cited as key differences between school and university feedback. A number of students expressed a sense of intimidation when approaching university tutors for feedback, suggesting that the lack of a personal connection between learner and teacher can impact negatively on the feedback process. 

Student quotations:

• ‘It’s harder to talk to someone in a university as it’s just so huge and widespread!’ 
• ‘It’s not that comfortable to approach a tutor for help because you don’t have much of a relationship with them.’ 
• 'It feels like you have to pester the lecturer/personal tutor to get feedback dialogue going. It feels like a one way communication.’ 

 

Implications

In the context of this feedback-rich environment, the F3 project aims to provide support to students and staff to maximise the usefulness of the feedback process and to make the case for the effectiveness of feedback for learning across modules. Its key goals are to:

• Support students in making a successful transition from the more nurturing feedback environment of school to self-regulated learning at university.
• Provide practical, evidence based recommendations to teaching staff to complement the University of Sheffield’s Principles of Feedback.
• Support students in seeking out, recording and exploiting the full potential of the feedback that they are receiving. 
• Enhance the quality of one-to-one interactions between students and module tutors and/or personal tutors.

Watch this space for a discussion of the Flexible Formative Feedback Project's proposed outputs.

Project Plans for the New Year

I’m Andrew, a 4^th year medical student working on the F3 SALT team to improve feedback at the university. First of all I would like to say a big thank you to all level one students who engaged in our feedforward project in November. With so much data to go through it will be exciting to see what trends will emerge in our report based on the results. As well as providing us all with an in depth background relating to feedback transition from school to university, it also gives our project a good kick-start.

If you who have summative exams after the Christmas break (1^st years and other years alike) on behalf of our team we wish you good luck. For those of you who are having your first summative exams in January I hope you are not finding it all too stressful. If you’re struggling, check out the website below which I have found helpful in the past. At the end of the day it is about implementing work into your routine and not tiring yourself to death. The most useful thing I find is drinking lots of water!

http://www.topuniversities.com/student-info/health-and-support/exam-preparation-ten-study-tips

As well as wishing you luck, we thought we would give you a taste of what is to come for the New Year. After attending the annual steer group with the faculty leads involved with our feedback project it gave the team an idea of where to take the project and who to target. The plan so far is to work with ten individual departments, to build up a cross-section of disciplinary practice. We plan to produce produce feedback profiles that will provide evidence of the forms of assessment they use, education materials and training and information they provide to their students for how to obtain effective feedback. By comparing department results it will give us a better idea of what is working well and highlight areas for improvement. By discussing these issues with staff and students of all years in these departments, we can really get to grips with specific areas for feedback improvement. The student focus groups will be scheduled for February-March which will hopefully give you as students time to reflect on your feedback you have received for your summative exams.

That’s everything for now, have a very happy New Year’s Eve tomorrow and stay tuned on our blog over next year.

All the best,

Andrew

Feedback Focus Groups

After a month of hard work and campaigning, F3EDFORWARD month culminated with our feedback focus groups, which took place on 29 November in the IC. We wanted to host a lunch as we thought that a free lunch would be a great way to draw in hungry first years in-between lectures! Furthermore, we wanted to create an informal environment allowing people to have a drink and chat. We worked with a small group of 8 level one students from different departments and faculties. Having smaller groups enabled everyone to have ‘their turn to talk’ and it allowed us the time to question what people were saying to us. It was certainly a case of less is more!

We started off the focus group with a short introduction about the role of the SALTs and a brief overview of our project. We then split the group into 4 and had 3 SALTs with each team; one to facilitate, one to ask questions and a support. In our team, we were fortunate to have representatives from arts and humanities, sciences and engineering and law, which was a good mix. It became obvious that there were huge variations in the types of feedback that the first years had been receiving and there was some clear dissatisfaction. Science faculty students complained about MOLE tests where they received a mark but no feedback. In contrast, Arts and Humanities students were struggling with not having received any feedback as their assessments were taking place in January and they had done no assessed work so far. It became increasingly obvious that the nature of feedback depended on the type of work which was being undertaken and this has led to significant differences between subject areas. This has huge implications for our project as a cross faculty initiative; specifically how can we design feedback tools that can be applied over such different subject areas which have such different types of assessment?

Level one students also talked about the role of their mentors/personal tutors as good sources of information on receiving feedback and where they go for help and guidance. This is a way of receiving help with feedback that we hadn’t previously considered. It was encouraging to see how important feedback was to the students who arrived for the focus groups and the depth of the data and discussions we had will be invaluable for our research. It was a good finale to such a busy month!

Stay tuned to our blog post over Christmas! We’ll have a post-up each week about what’s going on. The team is currently in the process of dealing with all our data and we will be writing a report over Christmas about our findings.

What Feedback means to US

The SALT F3EDBACK team discuss their own experiences of feedback at university.

 

Student Union Stall: What We Learned

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.

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 (29^th 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.

Until then, please follow @F3EDBACKforUS on Twitter, like our Facebook page and continue to give us your valued opinions.

'Students Talking to Students'

I’m Dr Chris Stokes, and one of the small team of staff* who started the process of what has become the ‘F3EDBACK for US’ project. The project idea came from a meeting in the Arts Tower early in 2013, where we discussed the idea of a student-led feedback project and how to fund it. We were lucky that the Higher Education Academy were looking to fund projects like ours, and even luckier to be awarded the money to support it.

The idea for the project came from the understanding that as teaching staff we knew that we wanted to increase the satisfaction of students with feedback (the National Student Survey provides us with annual measures of student satisfaction), and we also knew that the answer would be more complicated than simply providing more feedback. We wanted to have the conversation with students across campus about what feedback meant to them, how they thought it would be most useful to them, how often they wanted it, and in what format.

There are lots of well established channels of communication in the University for these sorts of discussions to take place (through course reps, the Student Union etc), but we thought that there was one that was currently missing: students talking to lots of students, in person and through social media, specifically about feedback. Through these channels the conversation has the potential to get to all students, to interact with them in many ways, at many levels, and could be facilitated by the very people who can identify with them best - their peers. Using the information gathered from such a massive conversation, best practice examples and guidance can be collated and given to teachers across the University to help them improve the effectiveness of the feedback they provide in their teaching.

The F3EDBACK for US Student Ambassadors for Learning and Teaching (SALTs) are now guiding and working on the project, and over the next few months they will be touring, talking, blogging and tweeting about feedback, gathering information from students and staff about what they think is most effective. We’ll then be sharing the best ideas and advice through this blog and our website, so please let us know your thoughts on feedback, come and talk to the team if you see them out and about, and visit our webpages to see how we are getting on.

*The cross- faculty team that put the bid together were Dr Chris Stokes (Medicine, Dentistry and Health), Dr Penny Simons (Arts and Humanities), Ian Hicklin (Social Sciences), Claire Allam (Student Services), Professor Alistair Warren (Science) and Dr Graham McElearney (CiCS). The project is now being run by the F3EDBACK for US Student Ambassador team together with Oli Johnson (Academic and Learning Services).

F3EDBACK for US at the SU

STALL AT THE UNION!


Don't forget to come and have a chat and a biscuit with us at the Students' Union this week! We'll be around with nibbles and surveys from Monday 18 - Thursday 21 November from 10am-3pm !!