Reading Activity 3

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Read the following article, which is available online Links to an external site.:

Boud, D., & Molloy, E. (2013). Rethinking models of feedback for learning: The challenge of design. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 38(6), 698-712.

This paper argues for an extension of the notion of feedback – beyond an episodic, mechanistic practice towards an overarching notion of student self-regulation to frame a curriculum (and that also translates to day-to-day practices within the curriculum). This conceptual shift is founded upon another premise; that is, about the way that we think about how learners operate within a course, framed in terms of: 1) learners, 2) curriculum, and 3) learning milieu. They called this model Feedback Mark 2.

Read the edited excerpt from Boud and Molloy’s (2013) paper (pages 705-709) in relation to Feedback Mark 2 and consider the reflective questions provided at the end of this page.

1. What do the learners bring?

Feedback Mark 2 requires the active positioning of learners as elicitors of knowledge for improvement, not just the recipients of inputs from others. Unless students see themselves as agents of their own change, and develop an identity as a productive learner who can drive their own learning, they may neither be receptive to useful information about their work, nor be able to use it. Probably, the most influential account of feedback in higher education is that provided by Nicol and Macfarlane-Dick (2006) in their seven principles of good feedback. The assumption behind their principles is one that we share: "that students are already engaged in self-regulation but that some students are better at self-regulation than others; and it is the weaker students that need opportunities to enhance their sense of control" (Nicol, 2009, p. 338). Nicol recognises that "students are always informally engaged in the self-regulation of learning when they participate in academic tasks" (Nicol, 2009, p. 338) and that "when students receive feedback from teachers they must engage in self-assessment if they are to use that information to improve academic performance: that is, they must decode the feedback message, internalise it and use it to make judgements about and modify their own work" (Nicol, 2009, p. 339). He argues that higher education teachers should build on this capacity to seek, interpret and use, rather than focus all their efforts on providing expert feedback.

Developing this evaluative capacity is central to Feedback Mark 2 and we suggest at the heart of any higher education curriculum. Both students and teachers need to see feedback as a way of promoting learning through fostering active learners, not as individual acts of information provision and reception. That is, feedback is not viewed as ‘telling’, but as ‘appreciating’. It ends not in ‘telling’, or even ‘reading’, but in acting. It is therefore not a process that is done to students, by educators. All stakeholders in teaching and learning need to be explicitly orientated to the purpose of feedback as self-regulating, and to view it as a means to increase capability in making judgements and acting upon them. This starts with the fostering of learner dispositions towards seeking feedback.

2. Curriculum features characteristic of Feedback Mark 2

Refer to Table 1. Curriculum features characteristic of Feedback Mark 2 on page 707 within the Boud and Molloy (2013) article.

3. What of the learning milieu

The prime characteristic of the necessary learning milieu for this conception of feedback is that it is one in which dialogue flourishes. As Carless et al. (2011) have emphasised, students need to engage in dialogue about monitoring their own work, what constitutes appropriate standards of judgement and plan their own learning if they are to discriminate what is quality performance and enact it. Dialogue is also needed to interpret standards and criteria and discern how they are manifested in their own work and that of others. Dialogue here should not be taken literally as face-to-face or one-to-one conversations, but as all forms of interactions of different kinds with different actors (teachers, peers, practitioners, consumers and learning systems) with a view to eliciting perceptions and judgements, and discerning what is needed for improved action. A further important dimension in considering the learning milieu is what Carless (2009) has identified as trust.

Consider the following questions:

  • How might you promote students’ capacities to seek, interpret and use feedback?
  • How might you help students to better understand their role in feedback?
  • Examine each of the curriculum characteristics outlined in Table 1. Curriculum features characteristic of Feedback Mark 2 on page 707 within the Boud and Molloy (2013) article. How might current offerings be revised to align with these? What pedagogic strategies might be added?
  • How might you embed dialogue within your unit/course? (remembering that dialogue doesn’t need to be synchronous or face to face).
  • What features of the learning milieu might promote trust?