Exploring feedback practices that students value

In our experience of working with course teams, staff demonstrate a broad understanding of assessment literacy: there is an acknowledgement of the importance of academic feedback and its role in learning (Ramsden 2003), an awareness of social affective dimensions of feedback (Xu and Carless 2017) and familiarity with the long term, educational purpose of feedback (Boud 2000, Sadler 2010). Similarly, mechanisms for developing consistency throughout the assessment process via informal and formal moderation are widely implemented across our institution. Nevertheless, students indicate that there is diversity in the way staff approach assessment and feedback, and staff themselves indicated hesitancy in challenging practice in peer review. A broad understanding of the principles of assessment literacy might be sufficient to inform individual practice but inadequate to challenge the practice of others, or to develop consistency across a team. Therefore, we focused our research on feedback literacy (Sutton 2012) as a subset of the broader field of assessment literacy. We wanted to examine how the shared principles of feedback (such as Nicol and MacFarlane-Dick 2006) are translated into writing. We also wanted to develop, together with a staff group, a practical understanding of what it means to write feedback that students value in order to develop consistency of team practice.