Cathy Dantec and Bill Soden – Language and Linguistic Science and Education

Abstract | Presentation: Session H

Report
The workshop provided us with two perspectives on how the practice of providing formative feedback has developed and its links and implications for summative assessment.

Both Bill and Cathy described how they had used screencasts to provide formative feedback to students. While this had proved popular with students they questioned how effective it had been to support learning. In particular they were both concerned with its potential to reinforce reliance on the teacher for direction, undermining efforts to produce student autonomy and self-correction as well as difficulty in getting this type of feedback to “feedforward” to subsequent assessment.

Cathy described how she has taken some of the ideas around providing targeted feedback to students and incorporated iterative student development (feed forward) and peer review and critique through the development of a summative student writing portfolio that is embedded across the first year of the French Degree programme.

Participants discussion addressed issues such as the nature of formative feedback, differences between disciplines and barriers to its use.

As ever there wasn’t nearly enough time to unpack all the issues in this thoroughly thought provoking session and I look forward to seeing the discussion continue online using the comments feature below.

Simon Davies, e-learning development team