Exploring Students’ Feedback Literacy Development Following a Work Placement Year

As teachers, we are designers. How we design assessments and opportunities for feedback enactment are critical aspects of teaching practice. Assessment design offers a key point of leverage for enhancing education, because many students strategically focus on it. While students may skim assigned readings or skip lectures, they must complete assessments to progress. Higher education assessment also structures many hours of students’ independent effort and influences classroom preparatory activities educator’s design. Thus, improving assessment can have a big impact on student learning. In this talk I will specifically discuss authenticity in assessment and how programmes can create opportunities through work placements or periods of time in employment which address specific learning objectives or competencies in different assessments as students’ progress. I will specifically draw upon research carried out in the UK that exposed students to an assessed year in industry. Twenty-four final year Business students (m=11, f=13) who had experienced a work placement were interviewed prior to the commencement of their final year of study at a UK University and following their final year of study. In the second part of the talk, I will explore how this work placement influenced students’: appreciation of different forms of feedback; judgements of quality and standards; ability to manage affect in the feedback process; and their enactment of feedback.

In all of the conversations relating to feedback enhancement of student learning needs to be at the forefront. How do we create meaningful opportunities for feedback to be part of the conversation in our classrooms? How authentic or signature is feedback within our disciplines? How do we as teachers help our students to appreciate, seek out and enact feedback from differing sources?