[MUSIC] Welcome back. This is week two of this six week course on assessment. We're focusing on feedback and today we're going to look at research that we've done looking at how teachers and students actually understand feedback, what their perceptions of feedback are. We've shown you already what the theory and the research evidence says about what good feedback is. Now we wonder, do teachers and students see it the same way? Again, the goal is to focus on the validity issues of assessment qualities. Royce Sadler correctly reminded us that there are three conditions for effective and useful feedback. The learner needs the feedback, and the learner needs to know that they need the feedback. If students think that they already know everything there is to know and can do what they need to do then, of course, they won't seek feedback. The learner also has to receive that feedback and have some time to be able to use it. And this is quite variable between students, some students need more time to process the feedback, and some students need to be able to get that feedback and it's harder for some students to get that feedback if we have large classes and we don't have a lot of time to give feedback. And the student has to be willing to make use of that feedback. It's like the old saying - you can take the horse to water but you can't make him drink. In this case, the student has to be given the feedback and them make a deliberate choice to integrate that feedback into their study and the learning processes. And this is a challenging task. On screen now you can see some research that we've done with New Zealand students where we've asked them about feedback and we've asked them to draw pictures of feedback. And these pictures which you'll best print off and study in detail, show students describing feedback in a way that teachers are telling me how to improve and they don't see it as a bad thing at all. They see this, they're portraying this with happy faces, showing that the teacher's telling me what I need to do to get better, whether it's details on my test paper or it's comments in class. And the survey research that we did with them showed that they're very committed to they think assessment is the teacher giving me comments on how to improve, and it's between us as people. So, they want that personal experience of the teacher telling me personally how I can get better. And they disagree that feedback is negative. So, this is a very positive view of assessment feedback in our context here in New Zealand. And the next slide shows two more pictures of the kind of world we want students to be in. This is the golden target of a culture where feedback contributes positively to learning, where students are actively using that feedback to guide their improvement. This is the target. And we're so excited and pleased when students describe feedback to us in these terms. So, there's an interesting challenge for one of the things that you can do between lessons is ask your students about how they understand feedback. Students tell us certain things about feedback that they think are important. They like it to be fair. "If I've done good work, don't tell me I've done bad work." "Don't tell me the little things I've done wrong, show me the good things I've done right." And they want it to be kind of equal across students, so, "If I do really good work, don't criticize my spelling when another student who's done much poorer work gets praised." Students want fairness. They also want feedback to be specific. "Tell me exactly how I can improve." The feedback has to be accurate, clearly structured around clear criteria in words and language that students can understand. This is one of the tragedies of basing our feedback on curriculum statements. Often, curriculum statements don't make sense to students, so teachers have to do that translation. This is what it means in terms of the student language. They like the feedback to be timely. They like the feedback to identify both strengths and weaknesses. They don't want to be sold just the golden egg story. They want to know, what am I doing well and what do I need to work on? And they want it to be non-judgmental, not blaming or shaming me and it has to be from a credible source. And students to rely on teachers to be credible sources, which places the challenge on teachers to know how to teach and give feedback and how to improve in these areas that we're teaching. And here's some more examples of unfortunately where we think teachers have missed the mark, where they failed to give feedback. And on screen you can see some samples of students self-reports giving themselves feedback about the quality of their work and of which unfortunately, the teacher, perhaps because the teacher is really busy, has given either to sign the feedback or ignored the negative comment, and said that this student was doing well when the student had doubts about their own competence. Instead of engaging with the learning opportunity, and giving constructive feedback on how to improve, the teachers simply noted the self-feedback. I understand teachers are busy, I understand teacher workloads are large, I understand classroom work is high, but when students give feedback like that to a teacher, it shouldn't be ignored. Giving each other feedback is an important source of feedback. There's one teacher, and many students, so if students can give each other feedback, this is a good thing to do. And we followed up a study in a New Zealand high school where the students were marking each others writing. And in this case, the teacher had to intervene because the student marking the work had given a very positive comment on work that actually was below standard. And the teacher told us this story and she said, "Nancy was marking Joseph's essay. And she passed him on a terrible piece of work. So, the teacher intervened and talked to both Nancy and Joseph. And she said to Joseph, 'I think Nancy is being very careful about your feelings here, but I'm going to tell you both that I think you may know that it's a Not Achieved piece of work. You've only done one book, you don't have th second half of your assignment. And you don't have these things here. Nancy's being really gentle with you but you need to know that this is not a pass.'" So, here the teacher has given the unfortunate bad news to both parties, but she's based it in the criteria and in the targets and she's being non-judgmental and fair about it. But unfortunately Nancy was just looking at Joseph with this "I love Joseph" kind of look in her face. So, there's always a social dilemma in giving feedback. Even asking students to give each other feedback creates a dilemma. It is difficult to give students negative feedback when their work does not meet the standards, the criteria, when they don't do what we've taught. That is difficult. In terms of giving feedback, we've identified some challenging issues of both with having teachers give feedback to students, and students giving feedback to each other. In the next topic, Dr. Keegan's going to come back and talk to you about feedback in a multicultural and diverse population situation and how those processes can still be used, but with some adjustments. [MUSIC]
