MMU Good Practice Exchange

Effective, Efficient
and Transparent Feedback

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Project Details

Providing summative feedback can often present challenges for markers, especially when there are large groups of students wanting high levels of detail. Dr Nick Lund, Senior Learning and Teaching Fellow and lecturer in Psychology, developed a system for giving students effective and engaging feedback that is efficient for markers to produce. The feedback approach used involves breaking down an assessment into sections and creating band descriptions for each. For feedback, students receive a mark for individual sections and an overall comment. The marking criteria, which are available to students via Moodle or other WebCT, are used to contextualise students' marks. Broken down in this way, students can identify areas of strength and areas for further development and engage in a meaningful way with the feedback provided, to enhance their work in the future.

"The marking system is being adopted by a few other people in the department now. I originally did it for reports in Psychology because it is easily broken down into different sections and marks for different sections. But it has been adapted for other sorts of work. Each time it has been used it has been adapted and added to."