Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

hink back to your time as a student. How did you experience feedback from your own instructors? Did reading their comments on your work bring moments of elation? Pride? Disappointment? Bewilderment? Do you still have a visceral reaction to a lot of red ink? 

Feedback can be a powerful force in college classrooms, and there are ways to make the experience of providing and receiving it even stronger. That’s especially important as students continue to report dissatisfaction with the feedback they get on assignments and tests — calling it vague, discouraging, and/or late.

Scientific research has changed, now being largely conducted in collaborative teams. However, undergraduate student training has not necessarily kept pace with these changes. In order to work effectively in collaborative settings, students need to develop not only the technical skills related to their discipline, but also communication and interpersonal skills needed to work in teams. Nora J. Casson reports on research which proposes a model for explicitly teaching collaborative skills, while engaging students in meaningful scientific research. Skills such as managing data from multiple collaborators or giving and receiving feedback via file-sharing platforms should be taught as explicitly as traditional skills such as how to use a pipette or how to formulate a hypothesis.

The following conceptions of feedback were offered by a group of students studying to become physical therapists. They were asked to recall a situation during their time in higher education when they felt they’d experienced feedback. Then they were asked a series of questions about the experience and about feedback more generally: “What is feedback? How would you describe it? How do you go about getting it? How do you use it?” (p. 924) The goal of the study was to investigate students’ conceptions of feedback. Student conceptions involve underlying personal beliefs, views, and ideas, unlike student perceptions, which explore how the feedback is understood.

Meaningful feedback is a very important part of any learning environment, allowing learners to monitor and track their performance, while making sure they’re on the right path towards their goals. Feedback is also a valuable tool for educators, with discussions with learners helping content creators to assess the effectiveness of their materials and improve processes.

This post is a personal example of social learning and serendipity which led to learning about how acrostics can be used and the creation of three animated videos.

Last week I was following the conference hashtag #AHEConference2019  for the international Assessment in Higher Education conference and wishing I was there in person. However thanks to the many colleagues tweeting I was able to pick up some interesting points being shared. Two tweets in particular shared photos of slides for two of Professor Sally Brown’s presentations in which she had created acrostics to explore principles for feedback in one and learning outcomes in another.

“Student Voice” is something that many schools are focusing on and for a good reason.  If we, as educators, understand that we serve our students and not the other way around, getting their thought and feedback for not only problems but solutions in moving our schools forward, is crucial.

From my experience though, I have seen a lot of money, time, and effort, in getting thoughts and feedback from students, listening to their voice, and then often, no action based on what they have shared.  Dean Shareski wrote a challenging post on this and shared the following thoughts on “Student Voice”:

Students work on the feedback provided to them to bring the best out in their performance. However, there can be a possibility that students are getting the right feedback which hinders their growth. Without having the correct feedback it is impossible for students to work on their weak areas. As educators, the feedback provided needs to be of sort that can direct students towards better results.

Educational feedback though, has two main areas: assessing students and teacher evaluation. These may be complimentary (or not), but very much a feature of many educators' days. In this sense, I'd like to share the following infographic on the types of feedback which is possible to give learners and further on, a couple of suggestions on feedback and professional development for educators. 

Students can hear me explain what I am doing and why I am doing it as I provide feedback on how they can improve their written assignments.