Providing feedback

Assessment for learning: guide for law teachers

This is part of a guide, compiled by Alison Bone (University of Brighton) and Karen Hinett (UKCLE) in 2002, providing an overview of the chief issues involved in assessment and how it affects learning and teaching in law.

In order to decide whether assessment is effective or not it is necessary to distinguish between formative and summative assessment. These are usually equally significant as far as the student is concerned, meeting, as they do, different needs.

Formative assessment is primarily concerned with giving qualitative feedback so that students may improve. Summative assessment may often result in no feedback whatsoever, since it normally marks the end of a course and typically consists of a mark or a stark pass or fail.

If it has been decided that there can only be one summative assessment for a course, it deprives the student of any qualitative feedback on their performance or achievement of learning objectives throughout the course. Giving the students opportunities to test themselves on their learning is often welcomed and can take many forms, for example self assessment, peer assessment or computer quizzes.

Quality of feedback is an important issue for quality assessors, external examiners and of course the students themselves. It is only by comparison that lecturers can realise how feedback varies widely from subject to subject and from person to person.

Undergraduates often do not complain as long as the grade is reasonable, but postgraduate, post-experience students normally find qualitative feedback far more useful than a grade or mark and may well complain if, having written 3000 words, they are given two sentences of feedback. It is worth thinking about the following:

• at what stage in the course/module do students get their first qualitative feedback?
• how detailed is it?
• does this work contribute towards their final degree mark?
• is there any opportunity to give students feedback on their examination performance?
• should there be such an opportunity?

Ensuring success: asking the questions

In other walks of life it would not be true to say that we only learn when we pass an assessment, or that the most successful learners are necessarily those who gain the highest marks at the earliest opportunity.

Maureen Rees achieved national fame on BBC TV as the learner driver who had to take her driving test numerous times who is to say when she learned most or what finally led to her success?

The driving test is a good example of an assessment with clear criteria candidates know in advance the range of skills and knowledge on which they are to be tested, sample written tests are available with answers and, most importantly, if a test is failed there is immediate feedback (both written and oral) and often constructive advice on how to achieve in future.

Further resources

Assessing student work and providing feedback by John Bell (Cambridge University)
Providing individual written feedback on formative and summative assessments by Keren Bright (Open University)

References

Last Modified: 4 June 2010