ASSESSMENT AND FEEDBACK - 2024/5

Module Overview

This module enables participants to develop a holistic and contemporary understanding of the theory and practice of assessment and feedback in higher and/or professional education within different disciplinary, professional, global, and cultural contexts. Assessment and Feedback are some of the most hotly debated aspects of academic practice, and often the element of their educational experience with which students are least satisfied.  However, research indicates that whilst teaching and learning have increasingly become more student-centred in nature, assessment and feedback practices have been much slower to adapt. Through engaging in self-evaluative inquiry-led approaches to investigating and reflecting critically on their practice, participants are encouraged to identify and develop connections between theory and practice and integrate research and scholarship into the development of their practice. Learning in this module will be developed and applied in subsequent modules throughout the programme. 

Module provider

Surrey Institute of Education

Module Leader

WINSTONE Naomi (Sy Inst Educ)

Number of Credits: 15

ECTS Credits: 7.5

Framework: FHEQ Level 7

Module cap (Maximum number of students): N/A

Module Availability

Semester 1

Prerequisites / Co-requisites

None

Module content

The module is structured around five themes which enable participants to develop a coherent and contemporary understanding of assessment and feedback practices in higher and/or professional education. These themes include:  

 

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  Innovation in assessment design: Critiques and transformation of entrenched assessment and feedback practices and threats to academic integrity;  
  


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  Inclusivity in assessment: Communication of assessment standards and co-creation of criteria as means to make assessment processes more accessible; 
  


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  Assessment and Feedback Literacies: Conceptualising and developing evaluative judgement and feedback recipience skills;  
  


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  Feedback and the Affective Domain: How emotions mediate the relationship between receiving feedback and performance; 
  


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  Hidden Feedback: The role of internal feedback and feedback talk as rich sources informing feedback processes, and how these reflect authentic or signature feedback practices. 
  

Assessment pattern

Alternative Assessment

N/A   

Assessment Strategy

The assessment strategy is designed to provide participants with the opportunity to demonstrate: 

 

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  Critical engagement with theory and literature; 
  


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  Critical analysis of the relationship between research and practice; 
  


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  Identification of areas for development in their practice through engagement in self-evaluative inquiry;  
  


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  Nuanced understanding of the variability in assessment and feedback practices across disciplinary, global, cultural, and applied contexts; 
  


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  Integrated understanding of key challenges in assessment and feedback practices and the relevance of research to the generation of potential solutions. 
  

 

The module design is underpinned by the concept of constructive alignment to ensure that the learning and teaching strategies and assessment tasks align with the module learning outcomes. 

Thus, the summative assessment for this module consists of: 

 

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  Coursework: A critical evaluation of literature and the relevance to practice (LO1, LO2). Participants will select a research article relating to one of the five themes of the module and present a critical evaluation of the rationale, methods, analyses, and conclusions of the article. They will also analyse the extent to which the article provides relevant insights into their own setting and context of practice. 
  


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  Oral-type examination or presentation: Oral Conversation (LO3, LO4, LO5). Participants will engage in a professional conversation which will explore their learning from the module content and the guided learning tasks, the implications for practice in their own disciplinary/professional/global/cultural context, how self-, peer-, and tutor feedback throughout the module has influenced their learning journey, and how their learning through the module supports their understanding of key challenges in assessment and feedback practices in contemporary higher and/or professional education.  
  

 

Formative assessment: 

Dialogic feedback will permeate the entire module both informally, through the feedback talk and self-feedback that each session will support (synchronous and asynchronous), and formally, through the combination of tutor, peer and/or self-feedback that will be used to inform the final summative assessment tasks. Participants will be supported to develop their skills in the critical evaluation of research through a series of discussion activities on SurreyLearn. 

Participants will complete guided learning tasks for each of the five module themes which together constitute a patchwork assessment process (Winter, 2003). Patchwork assessment functions according to a series of priorities that reflect the learning and teaching and assessment strategies of the module (Jones-Devitt et al, 2016: 4): 

 

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  Contextualised within the real world, personalised, participant-centred and inclusive; 
  


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  Requiring continuous justification via synthesis and reflection; 
  


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  Supported by continuous formative feedback and peer engagement; 
  


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  Underpinned by bespoke learning significant to the participant; 
  


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  Reflection upon overall learning in relation to the broader context; 
  


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  Structured via continuous assessment that stimulates transformative and deep learning, and; 
  


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  Sustained through flexible, participant-centred pedagogies. 
  

 

A patchwork assessment process involves a number of small self-contained tasks (i.e. a patch) that are stitched together to inform a larger summative assessment, drawing upon tutor, self and/or peer-feedback to inform the development of the work. Each patch will require the development of different skills, including the development of digital capabilities, global and cultural awareness, and self-evaluative inquiry-led approaches to investigating and reflecting critically on practice. 

The Oral Examination will draw upon a synthesis of the five ‘patches’, which comprise: 

 

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  Theme 1 (Innovation in assessment and academic integrity): Participants will produce a written reflection upon the extent to which a current assessment task used in their practice (or that they experience in the MA programme) can be successfully completed using Generative AI, and the necessary amendments to the assessment design in order to secure academic integrity. 
  


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  Theme 2 (Inclusivity in assessment): Participants will collaborate to co-create an assessment rubric against the assessment criteria for the module. 
  


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  Theme 3 (Assessment and feedback literacies): Participants will design an activity to develop feedback literacy, or the application of a feedback literacy framework to a module or programme. 
  


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  Theme 4 (Feedback and the affective domain): Participants will engage in self-reflective analysis of an emotive feedback experience, its potential impact, and a resultant action plan for how to address future emotive feedback. 
  


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  Theme 5 (Hidden feedback): Participants will analyse a classroom transcript or a recording of their own teaching using the Feedback Talk Framework, reflecting upon the boundaries between teaching and feedback.  
  

 

Feedback: 

Participants will be supported to recognise markers of verbal feedback in seminars through their engagement with the feedback talk framework. Participants will also be supported to develop skills of generating internal feedback through comparison processes. Feedback will be generated for each of the five guided learning tasks through peer and tutor commentary via SurreyLearn. The feedback strategy for the module involves scaffolding to the extent that for the first three guided learning tasks, tutors and peers will provide an open commentary, and for the final two tasks, participants will identify areas on which to request feedback.

Module aims

• Facilitate participants' critical understanding of the role of assessment and feedback in the development of academic practice appropriate to their disciplinary/professional context
• Stimulate participants' critical reflection and evaluation of theory and practice
• Develop participants' critical appreciation of global and cultural variation in assessment and feedback practices
• Facilitate the development of participants' resourcefulness and resilience through reflection on affective responses to feedback
• Provide participants with opportunities for experiential learning by participating in feedback processes in the role of both student and teacher, for example through co-creation and peer feedback
• Enable participants to identify and articulate future developments to their practice informed by engagement with key literature and critical reflection

Learning outcomes

Methods of Teaching / Learning

The learning and teaching strategy is designed to: 

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  Provide participants with foundational knowledge of contemporary approaches to assessment and feedback and the core challenges in this area of practice; 
  


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  Enable participants to critically evaluate the relationship between theory, literature, and their own practice; 
  


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  Provide participants with opportunities to engage in experiential learning by experiencing assessment and feedback as students as well as teachers; 
  


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  Allow participants to work collaboratively and to appreciate the nuances of assessment and feedback practices in different disciplinary, global, cultural, and applied contexts; 
  


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  Develop participants’ professional practice and future employability by developing their digital capabilities, global and cultural intelligence, resourcefulness and resilience, as well as skills of communication, critical reflection, collaborative working, and action planning.  
  

 

In the Surrey Institute of Education, a core tenet of our learning and teaching strategy is the importance of examining theory and scholarship as it applies to participants’ unique contexts and experiences. Thus, this module facilitates the application of each theme to participants’ practice through guided learning tasks. The Surrey Institute of Education also has a series of values that drive our educational practice; two of these values are particularly pertinent to the learning and teaching strategy in this module. First, we hold a value of respect. We believe that participants on the programme with their diverse experiences and professional contexts are equals and we endeavour to build an inclusive and safe space within our provisions where everyone feels valued. Second we hold a value of dialogue. We believe that respectful and open dialogue is vital to development and are committed to an exchange of critically engaged ideas and opinions about learning and teaching that acknowledges the differences that are surfaced, and harnesses the mutual development that this can result in. These two values influence the learning and teaching strategy by placing emphasis on the importance of surfacing and discussing variability in practice across disciplinary, global, cultural, and applied contexts.  

 

The learning and teaching methods include: 

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  A synchronous seminar for each of the five module themes to give participants the opportunity to discuss key theories and literature, and to share experiences and challenges in their own individual contexts; 
  


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  A guided learning week for each of the five module themes, which gives participants the opportunity to complete a scaffolded task that facilitates the application of theory and literature to their own practice, and that builds towards the final assessments; 
  


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  Ongoing dialogue and co-creation through group tasks and discussion forums to introduce participants to self-evaluative inquiry-led approaches to investigating and reflecting critically on their assessment and feedback practices. 
  

 

Indicated Lecture Hours (which may also include seminars, tutorials, workshops and other contact time) are approximate and may include in-class tests where one or more of these are an assessment on the module. In-class tests are scheduled/organised separately to taught content and will be published on to student personal timetables, where they apply to taken modules, as soon as they are finalised by central administration. This will usually be after the initial publication of the teaching timetable for the relevant semester.

Reading list

https://readinglists.surrey.ac.uk
Upon accessing the reading list, please search for the module using the module code: GCAM004

Other information

The MA in Higher Education is committed to developing graduates with strengths in Employability, Digital Capabilities, Global and Cultural Capabilities, Sustainability, and Resourcefulness and Resilience. This module is designed to allow participants to develop knowledge, skills, and capabilities in the following areas: 

 

Employability: Assessment and feedback are challenging areas of academic practice and by gaining knowledge and understanding of contemporary developments in the scholarship of assessment and feedback, participants will be well-placed to develop innovative, inclusive, and learning-focused assessment and feedback designs in their own practice.  

 

Digital Capabilities: Digital capabilities are central to effective enactment of assessment and feedback in contemporary higher and professional education. Participants will learn about digitally-mediated forms of assessment and feedback and their implications for learning and the student experience. Participants will also engage with key contemporary challenges in assessment and feedback that are created or exacerbated by digital technologies, such as Generative AI and threats to academic integrity. The guided learning tasks also provide participants with the opportunity to develop or consolidate digital capabilities; for example, the task for Theme 3 is presented as a screencast. 

 

Global and Cultural Capabilities: Participants on the module come from a wide range of disciplinary, global, cultural, and applied contexts. Seminar discussions, group tasks, and discussion forums are designed to encourage surfacing and sharing of the variability in practice across these different settings. Participants also explore literature pertaining to global and cultural variability in assessment and feedback, such as cultural differences in power hierarchies and emotional responses to feedback experiences. Each theme starts with a recorded interview with an active researcher in the field of Assessment and Feedback from a different international context (US, Europe, Hong Kong, Australia). This enables participants to understand how global and cultural context shapes both research and practice, and their intersection. 

 

Resourcefulness and Resilience:  Feedback is inherently emotive and through this module, participants are supported to engage with their own affective responses to feedback, such that they can develop understandings and capacities to better support their own students in engaging with feedback. The assessment strategy for the module is intended to provide challenge and stretch for participants, and to encourage them to participate in activities that take them out of their comfort zone. Through the oral conversation, participants are supported to reflect upon their learning journey and to recognise how emotion mediates the outcomes of learning experiences.  

Programmes this module appears in

Please note that the information detailed within this record is accurate at the time of publishing and may be subject to change. This record contains information for the most up to date version of the programme / module for the 2024/5 academic year.