Feedback in Higher Institutions - Term Paper Example

Name: Unit: Class: Lecturer Abstract This paper focuses on feedback effectiveness in higher education. The paper uses peer reviewed journals to come up with relevant data on the feedback and its benefits, challenges and recommendations on how to improve it. Feedback helps in encouraging the students to achieve better grades through dialogue, concern and clarification on good performance. Despite its benefits, feedback faces challenges due to lack of prompt delivery, language used and ignorance by some of the students. The higher education has gained increased intake in students making it hard to provide personalized feedback. The paper recommends the feedback to be disseminated in a familiar language to students, be provided promptly and should look also on the positive performance. This will help the students in motivation. In conclusion, feedback should be treated as a vital tool in student performance. Feedback can help in meeting the students’ needs in excelling in higher education. Table of Contents Abstract 2 Table of Contents 3 Introduction 4 Background 5 Benefits of feedback 6 Development of self-assessment in learning 6 Dialogue 6 Showing Concern 7 Encouragement 7 Acts a clarification on good performance 8 Challenges associated with feedback 8 Recommendations 9 Conclusion 10 References 10 Introduction Feedback is a vital tool in improving the student reflective competence. Inn higher learning, feedback forms an important part of the student teacher interaction. Feedback can be defined as the information that is given to the students by their teachers regarding their performance in assessment. Feedback can also be the information that the institutions get from the students regarding areas where they need to improve. There have been a lot of researches done regarding how feedback helps the students in enhancing their performance. The students use the feedback as a means of communication from the tutor as well as a guide to help them in their performance. For students to be competent, they are supposed to be well aware of how they are performing in their studies. This can be achieved through feedback from their tutors. A good feedback should be geared toward knowledge of the current student performance as compared to the goals and standards set. The inadequacies that are noted between the student goals and achievement should then be used as feedback so that the student can improve. The student in the higher learning institutions can receive both internal and external feedback form their tutors as well as peers. The student is supposed to receive feedback and internalize it before acting on it. This paper will look at the way feedback is used in higher education as a vital tool for learning. The paper will give the potential benefits of feedback and problems faced with feedback strategy (Orsmond Merry & Reiling, 2002). Background According to studies done, feedback has been supported as one of the most important influence in their performance. Feedback has been associated with a lot of positive effects on the students’ performance compared to other methods of improving learning. This has led to many higher learning institutions enhancing it to gain the expected positive output from it. The main problem is that individual feedback has not been able to take place in higher learning institutions due to a large class sizes. There have been an increase in number of students in the higher learning institutions which has led to poor tutor student interactions. Though the students have increased in higher learning institutions the tutors still give feedback through writing comments on assessments. One of the main issues in providing feedback is that a lot of time is spent in marking and commenting. The cost of giving feedback to every student is high due to the large number and limited time. Whether the teacher in higher education gives effective feedback or not plays a big role in the student’s performance (Orsmond Merry & Reiling, 2002). In most of the higher educational institutes, some of the students are foreigners. These students look at the tutors as guardians as they are away from their homes. The effect of feedback on these students helps them to cope with the new environment. These students’ feels emotionally encouraged and are able to settle quickly as proved by studies. There is a need for the tutors to provide interaction to these students through feedbacks to help reduce social isolation. For feedback to be helpful to the students, the tutors must empathize on the quality and quantity of the information given. The effective feedback should act to help the students in performance and assist teachers in gaining information regarding the students (Orsmond Merry & Reiling, 2002). Benefits of feedback Development of self-assessment in learning Feedback helps the student to take an active role in their learning. The students who are able to follow the teachers’ remarks in the feedback are abler to perform well in their consecutive studies. The students are able to gain insight on how to self access and control themselves in their learning. The student gets the ability to monitor the existing gaps between their current performance and their goals. Being able to monitor is a step toward the engagement with goal oriented learning. Through the provision of feedback, the tutor builds an opportunity for the student to have the ability to monitor themselves. Feedback helps the students identify the weakness in their work and work in eliminating them (Orsmond Merry & Reiling, 2002). Dialogue External feedback from the teacher helps in creating dialogue between the student and teacher. The feedback acts as an authoritative source of information through which the student refers to in correction. Through feedback, the student can evaluate and correct their work. The student perceives the feedback as a dialogue in higher learning institutions. The student is able to engage the teachers in dialogue over the feedback provided. This discussion fosters a close relationship between the students and tutors. Though personal dialogue is in most cases not possible due to a large class size, the tutor can provide dialogue thorough use of classroom technologies (Orsmond Merry & Reiling, 2002). Showing Concern Most of the international students feel secluded in their new environment. This leads to them viewing the teachers as their guardians in the universities. Having feedback helps in increasing their confidence and they start perceiving the tutors as caring. The tutors’ provision of the feedback helps the international students to feel that the teaching staff is concerned about their welfare. Students perform well when they perceive that the teaching staff is concerned and interested in their performance. The feeling of being cared for is a great help to the students motivation (Hyland, 2001). Encouragement Feedback is an important tool in student encouragement. Most of the students perform better through motivation which comes from the tutor’s encouragement. One of the important aspects of a well written feedback in higher learning is motivation. Motivation helps the students to have a positive outlook in their studies. Students who are motivated have a tendency to go an extra step in their academic work. The feedback that is able to motivate the student determines how well they will perform (Hyland, 2001). Acts a clarification on good performance Form students tom achieve their goals, they must understand them first. Feedback helps in accessing the student progress towards their goal. The feedback helps in clarifying what the student is expected to achieve so as to reach their goals. Poor performance in most of the students occurs due to lack of clarity on the goal to be achieved. Feedback makes it possible for the student to evaluate how their performance is in relationship to their goals. Feedback acts as an important platform where students can compare their achievement with respect to the expected goals (Hyland, 2001). Challenges associated with feedback Language used by the tutor in some cases inhibits the student’s understanding. Some of the tutors use language that may not be understood by the students. The tutors may also utilize language that is only understood by them making it hard for the student to comprehend. Language plays a central role in the feedback system and when not used appropriately may lead to failure. The students may ignore feedback if they are not able to understand it especially in higher institutions (Sadler, 2010). Feedback is supposed to be disseminated at the right time. The tutors are supposed to give their feedback once they have marked the assessment. Poor timing in the provision of feedback is caused by the large number of assessment being marked in the higher institutions. This leads to the feedback being given at the wrong time which contributes to its underutilization by the students (Sadler, 2010). There is a tendency by the students to ignore the feedback given by the tutors. This is due to negative perceptions by the students who do not attach importance to feedback. There are in some cases students who treat feedback as a separate entity from their performance. This leads to wastage of time as the feedback goes unread by the students. Measuring the impact of feedback is hard and in most cases impossible. The data that can be obtained through measuring the impact of feedback is in most cases misleading and can also be invalid (Sadler, 2010). Recommendations Tutors should use a simple language that is common to the both parties. This will help the students understand and relate to the feedback. The tutors should be able to know the language that is capable to be understood by the students. Use of vague comments should not be used under any circumstance when giving feedback. There is a need for teachers to make sure that the feedback given correctly addresses the learning goals. This will help students in being more engaged in acting on feedback. Prompt provision of feedback should be enhanced in higher learning institutions. Despite the high number of students who have to be accessed, the tutors should be able to act fast in releasing feedback. This will enable the student to act on feedback with ease (Cooper, 2000). The feedback given should be able to point the problem to avoid vague feedback. The comments should be distributed on the assignment parts and final comment put at the end. There is also need to design the feedback in a manner that will not demoralize the students. The sections that the student has to act on should be well identified. There is also need to make sure that the feedback contains both positive and negative aspects of the work done. The positive aspect of the work acts as a motivation to the student (Cooper, 2000). Conclusion Feedback is an essential tool in higher education learning. Most of the students use the feedback to improve their performance and gain motivation. Feedback to the university students helps in gaining self assessment encourages them, acts as dialogue with tutors and clarification on performance. For most of the foreign students, feedback is a source of consolation in their new environment. Feedback faces challenges such as timing, language used and student ignorance. The tutors have to make sure that they give feedback in the right language, provide feedback at the right time and make encourage the students through giving both positive and negative aspects in feedback. The students should be given feedback as a basis of improving their performance in relation to their target goals. It is important to note the benefits that effective feedback brings to the higher learning. References Cooper, N.J. (2000). Facilitating learning from formative feedback in level 3 assessment. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 25(3), 279-291. Hyland, F. (2001). Providing effective support: investigating feedback to distance language Learners, Open Learning, 16(3), 231-247 Orsmond, P., Merry, S. & Reiling, K. (2002). The use of exemplars and formative feedback when using student derived marking criteria in peer and self assessment, Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 27(4), 309-323. Sadler, D. R. (2010). Beyond feedback: Developing student capability in complex appraisal, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 35(1), 535-550. Read More