The NSS, League Tables, University Procedures

This site is framed around new thinking about assessment and feedback. In particular that, internal feedback is the medium for the self-regulation of learning and that teacher feedback must be internalised and turned into internal feedback in order to impact on learning.  Hence what is important in effective feedback practice is to create opportunites that enable students to generate productive feedback. 

Many readers might take issue with these new ideas for a number of reasons:

1. What is proposed does not align with the University and Business School regulations - e.g. the university regulations require that we use specific forms to deliver the feedback and these forms do not align with the ideas being proposed.

2. The NSS asks questions about whether students about the quality and timeliness of the feedback they received, so if academics follow the suggestions here, and promote processes of internal feedback construction by students, this will lead to poor scores in the NSS. We have pages dedicated to responding to the NSS.

3. Students won't buy into the ideas being promoted as they come to the University to learn from teachers not to learn how to learn.

4.. The University is more concerned with being high up in the league tables of universities. This therefore requires that we pay attention to student satisfaction not to what is educationally best for our students.    

The authors of these ASBS web pages recognise these concerns and others of a similar nature.  However, we still believe that implementing the ideas proposed here are not contradictory to established practice.  Teacher feedback is still an important part of learning. What this site does is use research on learning to build a framework for best practice in feedback.