Teaching Excellence Initiative

The following are the guiding principles that underpin the Teaching Excellence Initiative in the Adam Smith Business School. They are an update on the principles that shaped the REAP project and that were published in Nicol and Macfarlane-Dick (2006). The belief is still however that the purpose of assessment and feedback is to help students develop their capacity to regulate their own learning. This will not only prepare students for life beyond university but research also shows that the more self-regulating students are the higher their academic achievement and motivation to study.

The Principles

Good assessment and feedback practice that promotes self-regulation requires that students gain practice in:

1. formulating goals for learning and identifying standards
2. making evaluative decisions about their own and others' work
3. generating explicit feedback for self and others
4. responding to and/or acting on feedback
5. discussing work and its evaluation with others (e.g. with peers and teachers)

Rationale for the Principles

The rationale for these principles can be simply stated as follows. First, students cannot regulate their own learning if they do not know where you are trying to get to (principle 1). Second, self-regulation by definition implies that students are making judgements about their learning, it cannot be developed only by receiving the judgements of teachers (principle 2). In making judgements about their learning students generate inner feedback (principle 3). Making, this feedback ‘explicit’ (e.g. asking students to write it out) raises students’ awareness of themselves as self-regulating learners. Turning feedback into actions for improvement is motivational, and generates further regulatory behaviour, as students see their performance improvements and the effects of their own regulatory actions (principle 4). Finally, dialogue particularly peer dialogue can help attenuate the teacher voice and give students a greater sense of control over their learning (principle 5). It can also be used to enrich any of the other principles as students might jointly formulate the criteria for a task, or collectively evaluate their own or another’s performance, or plan for the further use of feedback in groups.

Three key ideas about principles are: (i) they should be adapted to the disciplinary and teaching context - they are not templates to be slavishly followed (ii) it is not necessary to implement all the principles as they carry each other in use (e.g. when students make judgements - principle 2 - they must have something to judge their work against - principle 1) (iii) the more responsibility that students take for the implementation of a principle - the more they will learn and the more effective the development of self-regulation. See other pages on principles here and here.