Students and staff report that assessment feedback given on the BSc Psychology programme is not well understood or valued, and NSS scores remain stubbornly low.
We asked:
- Should we care?
- Do poor feedback ratings matter if student attainment is good anyway?
We employed a mixed methods approach in a staff-student ChangeMakers partnership to firstly understand student’s perception of assessment and feedback on the BSc Psychology programme at a granular level.
Student experience: students’ perception of feedback was linked to their satisfaction with the programme as a whole. Students only agreed slightly more than disagreed that feedback was clear and supportive to their learning, and there was a general mistrust and lack of understanding of how the mark scheme is applied. Students reported perceiving assessment and feedback practices as rather subjective and dependent on the marker, rather than objective UCL criteria, suggestive of a ‘hidden curriculum’ (Koutsoris et al., 2021).
We then trialled an intervention to provide group feedback to improve assessment and feedback literacy. Student confidence increased significantly with minimal staff effort, as described in the case study.
Discussion and Next Steps
We need to encourage imaginative rethinking of providing feedback and next steps to align staff-student expectations for feedback and we are currently collecting data from PGTAs and academic staff. Through this project we hope to address potential disparities in feedback experiences, empower students to actively contribute to improving educational practice and foster a shared vision of what constitutes valuable feedback on our BSc Psychology programme.
Download video transcript.
YouTube video: How to switch closed captions on/off.
References:
Carless, D. & Winstone, N. (2023). Teacher feedback literacy and its interplay with student feedback literacy. Teaching in Higher Education, 28:1,150-163, DOI: 10.1080/13562517.2020.1782372
Koutsoris, G., Mountfors-Zimdars, A. & Dingwall, K. (2021). The ‘ideal’ higher education student: understanding the hidden curriculum to enable institutional change. Research in Post-Compulsory Education, 26(2), 131-147. DOI:0.1080/13596748.2021.1909921