Assessment feedback only on demand: Supporting the few not supplying the many

Abstract

There are many pressures on academics to ‘satisfy’ students’ needs for feedback, not least the inclusion of questions about feedback. Many have commentated on the lack of student engagement with summative feedback while most believe that feedback is necessary to improve individual student performance. Several have looked at a range of reasons why students do not collect their feedback, but investigated in this article is how many students collected summative feedback and why they did so. This article outlines an action research–based intervention that involved offering feedback ‘on demand’ to undergraduate students and utilised access statistics data from the virtual learning environment to identify the actual rate of feedback collection by students. Investigated is whether or not there is a discernible preference for seeking feedback where there is a difference between the expected grade and the actual grade. Student survey and the virtual learning environment access data were used to indicate whether students are satisfied with a few short comments and a marking grid, if the mark is similar to their expectations. The resource efficiency and effectiveness for academic staff in terms of providing detailed individual feedback to all students are discussed.