Vikki Anderson$, Adina Pirtea%, Susan Onens$ & Karl Nightingale*
$Learning Support Team, %English for Academic Purposes, and *College of Medical & Dental Sciences. University of Birmingham.
Corresponding author:
Karl P Nightingale PhD SFHEA, Institute Clinical Sciences, College of Medical & Dental Sciences, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham. B15 2TT.
e-mail k.p.nightingale@bham.ac.uk
Tel 0121 414 6833
The National Student Survey has identified ‘Assessment & feedback,’ and the quality of feedback in particular, as key student concerns for several years, and this remains a priority across HE. Despite this, student satisfaction remains low, perhaps reflecting the pattern of summative ‘high stakes’ assessment, and the perception that much written feedback is impersonal, limited and/or does not ‘feed forward’ in a useful way.
The ability to give audio feedback on written work (e.g. via an online recording of the assessor’s comments) has been available at many HE institutions for several years, but there is little evidence of whether this has benefits for diverse student cohorts. We describe an ongoing project in a number of undergraduate, and pre-degree (‘Foundation’) programmes to evaluate whether this approach increases student satisfaction with assessment feedback. We have particularly focused on students with Non-English Speaking Backgrounds, and those disclosing Specific Learning Difficulties (i.e. Dyslexia), to evaluate the approach
This presentation will: (i) review what is already known about audio feedback from previous studies, (ii) present questionnaire and focus group data on how students respond to the approach, and (iii) discuss individual assessors’ perceptions of their experience. We propose to the open up the discussion to (i) discuss the audience’s experience of audio feedback to identify elements of best practice, and (ii) how we can optimise the approach for the diverse needs of different students.
Who is this workshop aimed at?
This talk is aimed at anyone with an interest in introducing educational technologies into their teaching practice, and how we can evaluate whether they offer benefits for all students.
Inclusion in higher education 