One student (S7) seemed to align well with the lecturer in terms of views about teaching, learning and assessment. She was strongly orientated towards a concept and scholarship focus and she demonstrated a deep and strategic approach to learning. Her focus on understanding, her analytical approach to assignments and the breadth of her reading are reminiscent of what McCune and Hounsell (2005) describe as high quality learning. Her motivation for
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learning was primarily personal interest, although she was also motivated to achieve the highest grades that she could.
This student expressed strong preferences with regard to feedback and clearly recognised the role of feedback for learning, in particular valuing the feed forward benefit of comments about writing style or about the quality of her argument:
“I guess the main thing was when I was looking at assignments where I found the
feedback particularly useful, it is about that balance between being specific so that
you can draw some meaning from it, whether it’s correcting a fact or correcting a
style of presentation or a way that you've done it.”
However, she tended to eschew working with others:
“I do tend to be relatively solitary in the way that, I don't do a lot of interaction with
the lecturers or, I just tend to study on my own and do it.” (S7)
This preference for working independently generally carried through to her response to feedback as she tended not to seek clarification by discussion with the lecturer even when she did not understand the feedback comments or could not understand how the comment applied to her work:
“That was one of the general feedbacks he gave in class, and the thing is that for me, I thought that I had. So again without it being specific, if he’d have scribbled
on [in the margin], so here you could have said this link to something, then I would
understand what he meant, but he said ‘state the links’. When I wrote it and even when I read it again I thought ‘oh I thought I had, I don't know what you mean’. So,
I don't know. I knew what he meant but I couldn’t see the application ...”
Bloxham and Campbell (2010) found a reluctance amongst students to seek help, suggesting that some students have difficulty in framing appropriate questions. However, this does not seem to be the case with S7: she was a confident student who demonstrated a high level of self-regulatory capability, and was able to clearly articulate what was unclear, but who simply seemed to prefer working alone. Interestingly, she did speak to James about one comment on the assignment: as discussed earlier in this chapter, this exception seems to be as a result of the comment being couched as a question. It could be that
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seeing a question in the comments, the student interpreted this as the lecturer expecting her to follow it up by speaking to him. Nevertheless, in spite of the
alignment between lecturer’s and student’s views on teaching, learning and
assessment, the student still did not seek clarification on all of the comments that she struggled to understand, which is almost certainly limiting the potential for feedback to help her to improve further.
5.6 Summary
The aim of this case study was to explore the relationship between student engagement with feedback and lecturer and student perceptions of teaching, learning and assessment. In this chapter the key findings have been discussed in the context of the research questions:
1. What are the participants’ perceptions of teaching, learning and assessment?
2. What do the participants perceive as the purpose of feedback? 3. How do the participants use feedback?
4. How do lecturer and student views about teaching, learning and assessment impact on student engagement with feedback?
The key outcomes of the discussion are summarised below.
x Perceptions of teaching, learning and assessment vary in terms of fact or concepts focus and the relative importance of scholarship. When perceptions are misaligned, some students appear to have greater difficulty in interpreting and fulfilling the assessment requirements as well as understanding and acting on the feedback that they receive.
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x There is sometimes a mismatch between perceptions of teaching and learning and approach to learning, suggesting that other factors are at play.
x Time constraints for the lecturer led to tensions between a quick turnaround and providing detailed feedback. This can lead to brevity in written comments which are more likely to be categorical in tone.
x Students perceive different purposes of feedback, including helping with future learning, but their use of feedback does not always match their espoused views.
x There is a mismatch between approach to learning and engagement with feedback.
x Multiple factors impact on how feedback is used, both from the lecturer’s perspective of producing feedback and from the students’ perspective of engaging with that feedback.
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Chapter Six: Conclusion
6.1 Introduction
This study set out to explore the relationship between student engagement with feedback and lecturer and student views of teaching, learning and assessment.
Participants’ perceptions of teaching, learning, assessment and feedback were explored through the analysis of transcripts from semi-structured interviews, whilst participants’ use of feedback was explored through a combination of document analysis and discussion with the participants.
The findings were presented and discussed in Chapters Four and Five. The conclusions are presented in the following section and related to the research questions, after which recommendations are offered for practice around assessment and feedback. The limitations of the study are then discussed before suggestions for future research are identified.