Dr. Ole Eggers Bjælde: Feedback loops, peer review and continuous assessment: Lessons learned from six years of data.

Abstract: Can we use feedback to create assessment activities in which students can practice their skills and understanding in a fully learning-oriented assessment culture? The combination of feedback loops and continuous assessment provides a potential solution, in which assessment occurs as graded tasks (written assignments, tests, and similar) distributed throughout the teaching period, whereby students can be tested in relatively low-stake assessment tasks. Here, students can test their understanding formatively using feedback from various sources, to improve their work, thus closing a feedback loop. Because of the grading aspect, students are likely to put a lot of effort into the feedback tasks, thus deeply engaging students in the otherwise difficult sense making part of feedback - thus boosting their uptake from feedback. The combination becomes particularly powerful when students become providers of feedback in peer review activities because it helps them internalise assessment criteria and standards within their discipline, and at the same time helps teachers overcome an otherwise heavy workload, providing feedback. In the talk, I will present research highlights from the fields of continuous assessment, peer review and feedback loops as well as my own experience as a practitioner, having worked with these aspects in the past six years of my undergraduate teaching in Denmark. In particular, I will show how continuous assessment with feedback loops can produce valuable data on student learning. This data that can help students to improve their understanding and teachers to develop their teaching

View the slides from Ole's talk