Feedback on Assessment Tasks: Usefulness and Best Practices Report

This report explores the crucial role of feedback in higher education, particularly its ability to bridge the gap between lecturer expectations and student performance. It highlights the limitations of traditional feedback methods and advocates for innovative approaches to enhance student learning. The report analyzes the usefulness of feedback, emphasizing the importance of stirring optimistic motivational beliefs, offering opportunities to close the performance gap, and providing positive reinforcement. It also includes practical recommendations for university stakeholders, such as implementing e-feedback techniques like email feedback, screencasts, video and audio feedback, and recycling written comments, to improve the effectiveness of feedback processes and foster student development. Desklib offers a platform for students to access this and other valuable academic resources.

Running head: ACADEMIC STUDY
Academic Study
February 11
2019

ACADEMIC STUDY 1
Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................2
Findings and Discussion........................................................................................................2
Stirring Optimistic Motivational Beliefs............................................................................3
Offering a chance to fill the gap between desired performance and current performance 3
Providing Positive Feedback..............................................................................................4
Selecting the right moment................................................................................................4
Conclusion..................................................................................................................................4
Recommendations......................................................................................................................5
Email Feedback......................................................................................................................5
Screencasts.............................................................................................................................5
Video and Audio Feedback....................................................................................................6
Recycling written comments..................................................................................................6
References..................................................................................................................................7

ACADEMIC STUDY 2
Introduction
Feedback is considered to be one of the essential activities as it assists student in improving
their learning experience. It has major influence on professionalizing learning at the higher
education level. Many professors are following the traditional ways of providing feedback to
the students. The traditional way of feedback is mostly incapable to meet the satisfaction of
the students in enhancing their learning experience (Evans, 2013). This paper comes with the
discussion of the usefulness of feedback and the best possible ways for the students to get
feedback on their task or assessment.
Findings and Discussion
Feedback is said to be the difficult issues in higher education ground. However, it is
recognized as the most important element of enhancing the procedure of learning of the
students. National surveys, in two nations that are Australia and the United Kingdom,
endorsed the above-mentioned statement. It can be found in the higher student environment
that providing feedback add effectiveness and value to the learning of the student. It has been
observed that feedback is being considered as the vital method to enable the development of
the student as the independent learners to regulate, assess, and monitor their own learning.
Eraut (2006) highlighted the influence of feedback on the future exercise and increasing
learning of the students as follows:
When a student takes entry in the higher education learning, the kind of feedback they get
whether it is intentional and unintentional will perform a significant role in determining their
learning futures. Hence, it is important to understand more about their learning, certainly their
sense of specialized individuality, framed by the feedback they obtain.

ACADEMIC STUDY 3
However, there is said to be high sign supporting the usefulness of feedback in order to
endorse the learning of the student, through diverse surveys conducted around the globe have
highlighted that learners or students are disappointed in regards of the feedback they get on
their assessments or work (Nicol, 2010). According to learners, there is absence of adequacy
in the feedback provided by their lecturers. On the other side, teachers believe that students
fail to use the suggestions provided to them through feedback (Mandhane, Ansari, Shaikh &
Shaikh, 2015). Now, with the developing environment teachers need to re-think regarding the
procedure of feedback they follow. They must avoid out-dated procedures to offer feedback
to the students. Keeping in mind the above-mentioned issue, some of counsels have been
provided in order to create feedback more valuable and effective for the students:
Stirring Optimistic Motivational Beliefs
Motivation performs a significant role in assessment and learning. Lessons on self-esteem
and motivation are essential because they assist student in understanding self-regulation
where they mostly be unsuccessful. In teaching, it is suggested that self-esteem and
motivation are likely to enhance when a passage has numerous low-stakes valuation
assessments. Whereas, feedback offers indication regarding achievement and progress, in
place of high stakes a summative task where proof is just about failure or success or about the
way learner is compared with its peers (Nicol & Macfarlane‐Dick, (2006). For instance, Sue,
the selected of the presentation is very simple and easy to read, Good choice!
Offering a chance to fill the gap between desired performance and current performance
For self-regulation, it must be noted how feedback influences theoretical work. Feedback
provides another change to the student to close the little or huge gap between the expected
performance and current performance. According to Boud (2000), the simple way to
communicate about the results from the feedback to the student is to provide some type of

ACADEMIC STUDY 4
response that can motivate him to perform effectively in the second chance. For instance,
Peggy you did a great work by including the citation in the APA referencing style. For the
APA format, you must place a comma just after the name of the author. The APA style for
reference is correct! Good work (Leibold & Schwarz, 2015).
Providing Positive Feedback
When feedback is provided it is essential, that student must feel positive regarding his/her
feedback (McGrath, Taylor & Pychyl, 2011). It is generally considered as the motivating
procedure of feedback that can be utilized by the student in improving his/her performance.
Feedback must not dishearten any student as it results in demotivation. Clearly, it is dynamic
to get the attention of the students towards the less effective areas of the task, though the
lecturer must be careful while offering “negative feedback.” Therefore, teachers can increase
the learning of the student by representing the feedback in a positive manner. For instance,
“the second paragraph of page number 4 comprises useful and helpful data that has been
elaborated clearly. The data in the same paragraph must be cited with proper source and a
reference represented on the page of references, Good Job (Leibold & Schwarz, 2015).
Selecting the right moment
Many times, it has been noticed that lecturers increases the burden of learners by providing
feedback. The key issue that must be understood by the lecturers today that they must limit
the level of feedback they are offering.
Conclusion
The above paper has represented the importance and usefulness of the feedback provided to
the students in their assessment or task. It has been observed in the above discussion that
feedback is considered as one of the essential tools that are used by the teachers to fill the gap

ACADEMIC STUDY 5
between the expectations and current performance. Besides this, the teachers provide
feedback to their student to assist them in improving their performance and learning more
regarding their topics of the assessment. However, today also teachers are making use of
outdated or traditional ways of providing feedback that does not add value in the student
learning. The above paper has also suggested some ways to create feedback more valuable
and effective to increase the student knowledge and understanding are providing positive
feedback, offering one more chance to fill the gap between expected performance and current
performance, and stirring positive motivational beliefs.
Recommendations
From the above discussion, it has been analyzed that teachers are making use of traditional
ways to provide feedback to the students that do not support them in improving their
performance and increase learning. To increase the student learning, it is very important for
the teachers to adopt E-Feedback techniques.
Email Feedback
Email is considered the most simple as well as an effective manner to offer feedback to the
student. There are diverse types of feedback through email. Some of the emails can normally
offer general remarks to the entire group of learners when one teacher is teaching a number of
students. On the other side, another type of email feedback is sending the electronic versions
of the response comprised of a form that provides feedback to individual student (Bashir,
Kabir & Rahman, 2016).
Screencasts
Screencasting is one of the newly developed technologies, introduced to lead lecturers to
show to students how work must be executed. A screencast list all the activities on the screen

ACADEMIC STUDY 6
of the computer, so it is mainly helpful for representing, for instance, how to use the software
or to write, or steps must be followed while calculating something, demonstrating the
procedure through which something is done (Bashir, Kabir & Rahman, 2016). Numerous
students can make use of screencast as it highlights the common problems that are encounter
by them in their assessment.
Video and Audio Feedback
MP3 players have widely been utilized from some years. Recently, they have been utilized to
provide feedback to the student (Bashir, Kabir & Rahman, 2016). It is broadly called a
podcast in the academic area. It support in offering quality feedback very fast like way
feedback is provided through physical meetings.
Recycling written comments
Individualized inscribed feedback could be essential in supporting students in their learning.
However, it is a very time-consuming procedure. If there are large numbers of students, it
increases the teacher’s stress level in making these comments (Bashir, Kabir & Rahman,
2016). In a few cases, comments could be recycled by using specialized software, and word-
processing packages.

ACADEMIC STUDY 7
References
Bashir, M.A., Kabir, R., & Rahman, I. (2016). The Value and Effectiveness of Feedback in
Improving Students’ Learning and Professionalizing Teaching in Higher Education.
Journal of Education and Practice, 7(16), 38-41.
Boud, D. (2000). Sustainable assessment: rethinking assessment for the learning society.
Studies in Continuing Education, 22(2), 151-167
Eraut, M. (2006). Feedback. Retrieved from
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1473-6861.2006.00129.x
Evans, C. (2013). Making Sense of Assessment Feedback in Higher Education. Review of
Educational Research, 83(1), 70-120.
Leibold, N., & Schwarz, L.M. (2015). The Art of Giving Online Feedback. The Journal of
Effective Teaching, 15(1), 34-46.
Mandhane, N., Ansari, S., Shaikh, T.P., & Shaikh, S. (2015). Positive feedback: a tool for
quality education in the field of medicine. International Journal of Research in
Medical Sciences, 3(8), 1868-1873.
McGrath, P.L., Taylor, A., & Pychyl, T.A. (2011). Writing Helpful Feedback: The Influence
of Feedback Type on Students’ Perceptions and Writing Performance. The Canadian
Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 2(2), 1-13.
Nicol, D. (2010). From monologue to dialogue: improving written feedback processes in
mass higher education. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 35(5), 501-
517.

ACADEMIC STUDY 8
Nicol, D. J., & Macfarlane‐Dick, D. (2006). Formative assessment and self‐regulated
learning: A model and seven principles of good feedback practice. Studies in higher
education, 31(2), 199-218.