Rachel and Clark have a conversation with students about their feedback, so it is a two-way process. Students learn the important academic skill of reflecting on their progress and become responsible for setting their own targets for improvement.

Teaching area

Assessment feedback

Course

Physics Foundation core Level 3 modules: Physics Foundation Year Laboratory A and Physics Foundation Year Laboratory B

Description

The feedback forms issued to students during their lab assessments were redesigned to improve the feedback process. These forms allow tutors to differentiate feedback according to students’ ability and attainment. Stronger students can be stretched through targeted extension tasks that maintain their engagement, while students needing more support receive clearer guidance to help them progress towards higher grades. It is important to support tutors to give meaningful, consistent feedback, particularly as students are assessed by different tutors each week.

The lab assessment involves:

Weekly practical: preparation and execution, for a short report which feeds into a presentation (semester 1) and a longer written report (semester 2) of one of their short reports from each semester.

Feedback process

The tutor marking meets twice with each student for a ten-minute one-to-one to allow dialogue at the start of the practical session and again at the end of the session. At the first meeting, feedback is given on the student’s preparation for the lab and at the second meeting, feedback is given on their execution of the task and their short report: written analysis/results/conclusion. The feedback form is filled in, but the feedback is usually agreed during the dialogue – involving the student is a vital part of the process. At each meeting, the tutor and student agree on a particular skill for the student to improve on.

Feedback is given according to the student’s level, giving them more help early in the semester. In a meeting discussing execution of the task, at a basic level we might talk about how they could improve their structure and formatting, for example, tabulating results correctly or remembering the units. Then, as they develop their skills, they learn to set their own targets. When they are at a high level, we ask them to decide what they need to improve on, for example, reading more widely beyond the lab script and learning to reference correctly, which are higher‑level learning outcomes.

The students use notes from the meetings to help them to prepare their semester 1 presentation and the long report in semester 2. They pick one lab to use as the example for the presentation and another for the report.

Figure 1: An example of the feedback form. Marks in the preparation and execution sections align with the marking rubric, and the free text box sets a clear focus goal for the next week’s lab.

Pedagogical foundation

This assessment feedback approach has a solid foundation in pedagogy. Through this process, students can see the purpose of the assessment, which is preparing them for their Year 1 labs – it’s not ‘just hurdles’ to jump (adapted from Sambell 2011: 11). Such ‘sustainable’ assessment and feedback practices ‘which may involve activities such as peer- and self-assessment, dialogue, and goal setting’ are related to the Higher Education Authority framework on sustainability of higher education (Winstone and Nash 2016). Furthermore, student reflection and self-assessment are important skills for life-long learning. Students overly focused on simply passing the course or ‘learning to please their teachers’ are limited to the programme outcomes and do not develop ‘future-driven self-assessment’ skills (adapted from Boud and Falchikov 2007: 124–5).

Outcomes

Academic skills and student support

• This practice fosters student agency – the students become responsible for setting their own targets. They build on their skills week by week.
• Reflection is embedded in the module too. As students become more aware of their own performance, they are more able to reflect on the lab session and start setting their own feedback task. The conversation is a reflective process – rather than the tutor just saying, ‘this is right/wrong’, the dialogue allows the tutor to ask the student whether they think they have met the criteria on the marking rubric. We make sure students have the rubric in front of them during the lab session and use it as a reference while marking so they can see what is required to score the next level up (for example, if they scored 2/3 on recording the raw data, how could they get 3/3 next time?) Students self-assess in their long report, giving themselves a grade. We then give them a grade so they can see how accurately they had assessed their performance.

Comments

This feedback system enables continuity between markers of the different labs. Each marker can see what the previous marker said.

References

Boud, D. and Falchikov, N. (2007) Rethinking Assessment in Higher Education: Learning for the Longer Term, Milton Park: Routledge

Sambell, K. and ESCalate (2011) Rethinking Feedback in Higher Education, Bristol: HEA SCE University of Bristol

Winstone, N.E. and Nash, R.A, (2016) The Developing Engagement with Feedback Toolkit (DEFT) (accessed 13 February 2026)