Any discussion of feedback must consider its function and value to students because the feedback that students receive has a strong influence on their learning. However, if we want to engage students themselves with the feedback in a way that they could also utilize it constructively, then the question is - what skills do the students need and how can those skills be nurtured?
DEFT outlines some of the key contemporary issues facing Higher Education practitioners in the domains of assessment and feedback and considers the role and responsibility of the student in the feedback process. The toolkit also presents a case study which outlines the development and implementation of DEFT. Finally, it presents different components of the toolkit: a feedback guide, a feedback portfolio, and a feedback workshop.
The toolkit consists of three components:
- Feedback Guide: Advice and tips on how students can make good use of their feedback. The guide contains two elements. First, it contains a flowchart which students can use to judge when and how they should attempt to implement their feedback. Second, the guide contains a glossary, offering explanations of various terms and expressions that they often see in their feedback.
- Feedback Workshop: This is an interactive workshop to discuss and reflect on effective strategies for using feedback, the emotional barriers to engaging adequately, and how to take the perspective of the feedback-giver. Alongside the basic workshop, there’re a variety of small-group and plenary activities, each focusing on different elements of feedback literacy, one or more of which could be used within the workshop. All the resources and tips that educators need to conduct the workshop or to customize the workshop format (to the needs of their students), are available in the guide.
- Feedback Portfolio: This is a repository in which students could organize and reflect upon their feedback. An electronic portfolio tool, which automatically gathers each student’s submitted assignments in one place, alongside all the feedback they had received for those assignments. By accessing this tool, students would be able to see multiple pieces of feedback together. This would facilitate their sense of progression, and their ability to detect recurring themes in their feedback. As part of this tool, space is incorporated for students to reflect on their development at intermittent points in the year, and for this reflection to be discussed with their personal tutor.
- DEFT was developed to support educators and students to work together in partnership, to overcome some of the key barriers to student engagement with feedback.
- The resources contained in the toolkit are designed to be flexible, such that an educator can choose different elements that seem most applicable to their students’ discipline area or level of study.
- The resources illustrate activities for supporting students in their engagement with feedback and should ideally be embedded into wider institutional or programme level strategies for developing students’ assessment literacy and self-regulation.
The toolkit is developed by Dr Naomi E. Winstone, University of Surrey and Dr Robert A. Nash, Aston University. Read more about the toolkit here and download the full toolkit pdf here.