I’ve recently been developing a staff development session on giving effective feedback, and so reflecting on what makes for good quality feedback and how the language we use when communicating with students can affect this. While pondering what should be covered in a short session, I was reminded of an incident from a few years ago:
After returning marks and feedback to my students, one of them contacted me: “you said my work was good, but you’ve only given me xx/20”. I sat for a while, flicking through my feedback to the class to check the mark I’d given to others who were ‘good’. Then to benchmark myself, I asked the open plan office of people in the same discipline to me, “What’s ‘good out of 20’ for a year 2 assignment?”. The air very quickly filled with answers very similar to my mark.
Remembering this prompted me to do a very unscientific poll of my close colleagues in our education development team this week; we all have excellent understanding of UK Higher Education, all have a passion for education and giving good feedback, but we also have varying ‘home’ disciplinary backgrounds. What, I asked, is the mark out of 20 for work you might describe as…?:
Busy discussions within the team followed. These were in part (rightly) about my quick and dirty research methodology. But more fundamentally, they’ve been about grade boundaries and students’ levels of study, and individual peoples’ and disciplines’ understanding of these and expectations around standards. We all generally agree that ‘adequate’ and ‘sufficient’ are similar, and that ‘excellent’ is better than ‘good’, and ‘good’ better than ‘poor’. However, the mark allocation for a description varies and things get more blurred when we get into modifiers such as ‘very’, or the international minefield that is the British use of ‘quite’. I perhaps should have thrown in ‘not bad’ [enthusiastic voice] and ‘not bad’ [pensive voice] to really mix it up [1].
What does this variation in opinion and experience in staff mean for our students? I hesitate to say that this is a ‘feedback’ issue as we all know that feedback should provide clear guidance on how students can improve future work rather than focussing on mark justification. Literature also backs this up, showing that improvement is the primary consideration when staff and students are asked the purpose of feedback[2]. Nevertheless, a student’s assessment of the quality of comments from their tutor may influence their willingness to engage with feedback.
Feedback should have clarity and be understandable[3]. This includes the language used. Language is powerful. Many of us would question the mismatch we would perceive if told a piece of work achieving 30% is excellent, but the range of marks from my colleagues shows nuance going beyond this obvious example. There are disciplinary norms in grading and in how we describe the standards of students’ work. There are also significant differences in the range of marks used in different nations. The key thing is to not assume students’, or even markers’, familiarity with them. This becomes even more important in an increasingly multidisciplinary curricular environment where studies can span a range of traditional subject areas.
So, what can we do?
Look at institutional rubrics and reflect on the words you might use
The internet is a wonderful source of resources. Many universities have their own guidance or rubrics. For instance:
- The University of Manchester’s Framework for the Design and Use of Grade Descriptors gives a table of words as guidance for giving feedback.
- Manchester Metropolitan University has similar guidance in its Policies and Procedures for the Management of Assessment.
- UCL’s Assessment Criteria Guide, based on the QAA Framework for Higher Education Qualifications indicates expectations for students from Level 4 to Level 7. It focuses on what a student can do, rather than a descriptor of the quality of the task.
Start a discussion with colleagues
The quick survey of colleagues proved an excellent opener for discussions. I’ve no doubt this will influence any marking we do together as a team.
Start a discussion with students
This could be setting expectations around the language students can expect to see when their work is graded. However, working in partnership with students is the key to finding solutions and strategies that work for everyone. Find out what students have been used to in previous education, and discuss the language that they would find most appropriate.
Find common ground and disseminate exemplars
This is the easy bit once you’ve had the conversations. Work together to come up with a programme or department-wide list of indicative language and make sure that markers have access to this. You might also want to include short sentences or paragraphs of model feedback to show how the language can be used to support colleagues new to marking.
[1] Just search the internet for ‘What the British really mean when they say’ for endless examples
[2] Dawson, P. et al, ‘What makes for effective feedback: staff and student perspectives’, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 44(1), 25-36, 2018, https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2018.1467877
[3] Nicol, D. (2010) ‘From monologue to dialogue: improving written feedback processes in mass higher education’, Assessment &Evaluation in Higher Education, 35:501-17 https://doi.org/10.1080/02602931003786559