Martin, Holly and I gave a presentation at the SRHE 2012 conference on the project entitled: Assessment Careers: towards a vision of post-modularisation. The slides are available in the documents page of this blog.
We presented the feedback analysis tool and some results as well as the student responses so far on how they use feedback and Martin’s pre-pilot on peer feedback. There was a good receptive audience and they asked the following questions and comments:
Q1 Will you be able to have a look at the kind of language that tutors use in their feedback?
Q2 If feedback is so problematic, maybe we should only do feed forward, we’ve switched to only giving feedback on formative work, not summative.
Q3 How do you develop the self-assessment skills of students?

Other presentations worth noting were:

1. Asghar and Hall from York St John University talking about Dialogue days. Where students and staff meet informally to discuss any aspect of their course outside classroom. They claim that this is more useful than course committees.
2. Dai Hounsell from Edinburgh has done a meta level literature review on feedback. He was not convinced that the feedback and assessment guidelines that are publicised across the sector are evidence informed. Most research on feedback is based undergraduate. Most feedback is on current content and not feed forward which matches our findings.

There were other critiques of feedback that is delivered to students and not discussed and more evidence that students do not find praise helpful but these other papers were not saying anything new.

Finally, the venue was very good!

Celtic Manor resort lobby