Enhancing Student Appreciation of Written Feedback on Essay Assignments
It is generally agreed that assessment provides the means for evaluating student learning. If assessment is at the heart of the learning experience, then feedback on assessment is essential as it potentially affects future learning and student achievement. Feedback has been defined as giving information about the gap between the actual performance level and the reference level, which is subsequently used to alter that gap (Ramaprasad, 1983). Although students generally appreciate and desire feedback there is evidence that they often ignore it (Hounsell, 1987), or do not understand it (Lea & Street, 1998) being interested only in the mark (Wotjas, 1998), whether they have passed and how their mark compares with their peers. In the words of Gibbs and Simpson (2004), assessment "sometimes appears to be one and at the same time, enormously expensive, disliked by both students and teachers, and largely ineffective in supporting learning". Snyder (1971) found that students were more influenced by the assessment than by the teaching and consequently, for assessment to be part of learning, effective feedback must be at the centre of this process.
As reflective academic practitioners involved in the delivery of bioscience material to final year undergraduates for a BSc (Hons) degree in Applied Biological Sciences, we are constantly struck by how little reflection seems to occur in our students who apparently do not apply feedback to future work and indeed seem to undervalue or even ignore markers' comments. They often appear to start the next assignment anew without applying the feedback from previous assignments.
As assessors, we provide feedback on students' work by commenting, correcting and awarding marks, but, the perception is, that students often skim over the written comments, do not apply the feedback to future work, and do not appreciate generic advice and how to apply it to situations outside the present context. In this way, students appear to approach each new assignment from 'scratch'. This situation is evidenced by us seeing the same mistakes repeated on subsequent students' work and often we have to write similar comments each time.
Our aim was to get students to:
• Appreciate the importance of feedback.
• Focus and reflect on feedback.
• Prioritize feedback comments.
• Draw up specific and generic action points resulting from feedback.
• Evidence their attitudes to feedback.
