I would say it’s the start of a new term (College term 3) and a new wave of scholarship circle sessions, but, in reality, it’s actually week 5! We had our first session for the term last week and this is me playing catch-up. The beginning of a new term is a notoriously busy time and particularly for the January cohort is a scattergun of coursework draft submission/feedback (+ for me as ADoS, in addition to doing my own feedback, providing support to teachers doing theirs) and speaking exams (+for me as ADoS double marking a portion of those with each of my teachers), so I’m actually pretty glad the scholarship circle didn’t get going ’til last week!

Our agenda was as follows:

1. Revisit the issue of our research on Quickmarks to see where we are at and figure out our timeline.
2. Decide on a focus for this term’s scholarship circle sessions
3. Set ourselves some reading homework

This terms research project update

The consent forms are ready to go and will be sent to:

• the centre manager
• the teachers of the students we have identified as the sample who will receive the questionnaire and from which participants for the text analysis will be selected (there are a small number of us and we will only be doing a small number i.e. 1-2 of text analyses each!)
• the students themselves. (We only need to send a consent form to those selected for text analysis as the consent form for the questionnaire will be built into the questionnaire).

We reconfirmed that we will be focusing on International Foundation Year (IFY) students rather than PMP (Pre-masters students) as PMP students’ course work tends to change dramatically between first draft feedback and final submission due to content tutor feedback, which would affect text analysis possibilities. We are aware that a range of factors influence response to feedback, e.g. age, pathway, language level, past learning experiences, educational culture in country of origin, so have picked IFY students with a particular language level (as defined by IELTS scores) and over the age of 18. This minimises the influence of age and language level factors on response, and avoiding ethical/consent/safeguarding issues that arise when minors are involved.

The text analysis will be done in the early part of next term. There won’t be time this term as once final drafts are submitted, teachers will be busy with coursework marking and then exam marking extraordinaire (biggest cohort of students ever this term). It will have to be the early part i.e. before the end of week 4, as beyond then, teachers will be busy doing first draft feedback for next term’s students. For next term’s students, if we are repeating the research cycle, we can do the analysis in the autumn term.

Focus for this term’s sessions

This term, including the current session, there will be 6 sessions. (Week 10 will be an impossibility due to above-mentioned exam marking extraordinaire!) We have decided to focus on comments, as a logical next step to the focus on Quickmarks that our current research is based on.

At the moment, we do have a generic comments bank which teachers can copy comments from in order to paste them into a student’s assignment. The aim of this is to save time and help teachers by providing them with ideas of what they can put. In practice, fast typists ignore the bank as it is quicker to type what you want to say than it is to read through a bank of comments, decide which one is the best fit and then do the copy-pasting. The comment bank also gets ignored due to it being generic rather than specific to a given student’s piece of work. It was noted that either which way, it is useful for new teachers as an extra point of support.

Going forward, we discussed the possibility of going through the bank of comments as we did with the quickmarks and making them more user-friendly (for students and teachers alike!). One idea was to have a base comment, with space to make it specific by referring to a given student example. Another idea was to refine the categorisation of the comments so that is easier to find the ones you need. We also talked about refining the bank by selecting the best comments with the widest structure and editing or culling any that seemed less useful (much as some of the quickmarks were edited or culled in a similar fashion).

Another issue that came out is the importance of familiarity – be it with the quickmarks or with the comments, the only way for these resources to be used effectively and efficiently is if teachers are familiar with them so that time isn’t wasted through not being sure about which quickmark/comment to use, if there is an appropriate quickmark/comment available etc. Familiarity is also important for students, so that they are better able to recognise what their feedback means and what they need to do. To address this, we had the idea of a “quick mark auction”. This would involve a list of sentences, each with a different mistake underlined, a set of corresponding quickmarks and a set of quickmark meanings. By the end of the activity, students (and new teachers!) would have identified what each quick mark means and which one to use with each error example. We have set up a google doc so that we can create this resource collaboratively:

Obviously no one has added anything to it yet – work in progress! It will happen…

As we did with the Quickmarks, we aim to inform what we do with what we read in relevant literature and discuss in our weekly sessions. Which brings me on to…

Homework

Our reading homework for this week (which I haven’t done yet – yikes!) is:

• Nicol, D.J. and Macfarlane-Dick, D. (2006) Formative assessment and self-regulated learning: a model and seven principles of good feedback practice in Studies in Higher Education 31(2) pp.199-218
• Burke, D. and Pieterick, J. (2010) Giving students effective written feedback McGraw-Hill Education

I better get to it!