Dave Ellis is a principal lecturer
in English at the University of
Wolverhampton. He is the
author of Writing Home: Black
Writing in Britain since the
War (2007) and In at the Deep
End? The first year in
undergraduate English.
English Subject Centre Report
Series (2008).
At a recent networking day for heads of department convened by the English Subject Centre, the topic of students’ collection of assessed coursework assignments was discussed. Some common practices emerged: mandatory tutorials; return through timetabled classes; mass sessions where all uncollected assignments are made available; returning work by post etc. Most common, however, was a certain bafflement over why students would not want to collect their work and read tutors’ comments in the first place. In my own experience, such incomprehension can turn to consternation where subject teams are prai
sed by external examiners for the quality of their feedback but also have piles of uncollected scripts in their offices and indifferent ratings from the National Student Survey on this very topic. How does it come to this?
One frequently cited explanation for this is the increasing tendency for institutions to allow students to access their grades online. This has the following possible consequences: a student is satisfied with the grade, puts the assignment behind him/her and moves on without seeing any need to revisit what is now finished work or, less frequently, a student is not happy with the grade and collects the work to search through tutors’ comments for an explanation for the mismatch of expectation and disappointment.
In each scenario, it is the ’back’ in feedback that is important. For the satisfied student, there is nothing more to be learned from an assignment that has been successful in its own terms. For the unsatisfied student, it is all about resolving the conflict between their memory of the effort that went into the assignment and its assessed grade. Anecdotally, it seems as though these latter cases are becoming increasingly common, with the effect that tutors’ comments become defensive and aimed at justifying a grade to students who are more willing than ever, it seems, to go through appeals procedures. In either case, it’s the retrospective relationship of the comments to the completed work that determines their usefulness to students.
Feeding back, however, has never been the sole intention behind comments on essays. Certainly, such remarks should discuss the relative merits of the work in hand, but such commentary should also look forward, providing guidance on students’ general scholarly practice for future work.
One way in which feedback on essays can distinguish general advice from specific commentary is through the use of tickbox pro forma. Here, box diagrams allow tutors to tick various aspects of the essay – for example, ’Use of English’ or ’Knowledge of texts’ – on a range from ’Excellent’ to ’Very poor’. Theoretically, I thought that such tickbox sections, if viewed across the students’ whole programme (rather than in relation to the specific assignment), might reveal consistent patterns of relative strengths and weaknesses in their work. Over the course of the programme, students would respond to such patterns and ideally see ticks indicating weakness migrate across the page towards more positive ratings. Discursive commentary would still apply to the specific assignment, but the tickboxes would provide a visual and recursive point of reference for self-improvement. In short, there would be a clear developmental purpose that should encourage students to collect their work.
As I knew that such tickbox sections were in quite widespread use across UK English departments, I decided to survey existing examples in an attempt to identify aspects of most common and/or best practice to produce a template that might be widely adopted across the sector. I received examples of tickbox pro forma from a small, but fairly representative, sample of departments – just over 20 in total – and from these some interesting distinctions and correspondences emerged.
For example, the only section shared by all pro forma that used a tickbox element was one on academic presentation, indicating students’ correct presentation of (typically) book/article titles, long and short quotations, end/footnotes and bibliography. I thought there were probably two motivating factors here. First, once students have been issued with style guidelines, their subsequent application of such guidance can be simply correct or incorrect and a ticked box can indicate as much rather efficiently. Indeed, the frequency with which I find myself writing ‘Underline or italicise book titles – not both’ and ‘Do not offset short quotes’ on students’ work makes a simple tick very appealing. Second, from an intellectual and pedagogic perspective, subject teams may consider that English is, by definition, a discursive discipline that should resist any apparently reductive approaches to assessment. A student may be simply incorrect in their presentation of a bibliography, but can their reading of Byron be treated in an equivalent fashion? I think an instinctive reluctance to do so has meant that tickbox pro forma – rather like multiple choice questions – has been considered by some to be inappropriate for our discipline.
This reluctance might also explain the less frequent appearance of tickbox sections grading ’Use of English’. In some instances this can also address technical qualities of spelling, punctuation and syntax where students can be simply wrong (for example, their misuse of the possessive apostrophe or confusing ’their/there’). However, where variations in the pro forma started to indicate more controversial ground, it was with the more subjective aspects of language use. The aspects referred to included ’Clarity of expression’, the ’Lively and engaged use of language’ or the ’Structure of argument’, and were variously located either within the responses to the objective technical qualities of grammar and spelling or within the subjective responses to the intellectual qualities of ’Critical analysis’ or ’Originality’.
The quality of written expression clearly is a defining aspect of assessed work in English. An insightful textual analysis can be undermined by being poorly worded and organised in much the same way that a somewhat mundane analysis can be flattered by lucid and coherent written performance. However, while expressive qualities are assessed in English, they do not often feature as part of the taught programme itself where ’content’ is given priority over ’skills’. Here, the way in which these pro forma are designed do not only say something about the qualities we expect in an English student, but also say something about our own sense of the limits of our discipline. Two other features contribute to this thought: first, where additional support for a student’s writing style is required, it is often registered on some forms as a ticked box referring the student to a peer-mentoring or study support unit that exists outside of the department itself; second, this was the section where the term ’appropriate’ was used (for example, ’Clear and appropriate style’ or ’Use of appropriate techniques’). I thought the term appropriate a strangely vague and not terribly instructive one in this context and therefore, perhaps, indicative of a certain nervousness in dealing with this category of student performance. Would a similar tension be evident in the intellectual qualities included in such pro forma?
Here there was considerably less consensus in the construction of the pro forma, not just in identifying shared intellectual qualities, but also in finding ways of succinctly defining them. For example, variations on the theme of ’Knowledge’ and ’understanding’ recur, but not in any consistent fashion. Sometimes, ’Knowledge and Understanding’ was a fixed category; on other pro forma it is modified with phrases such as ’Awareness of critical/theoretical debate’ or ’Lively engagement with debates about the assignment question’. Similarly, ’Quality of analysis’ (a capacity surely central to our discipline) was either a heading with subcategories (’Skilful’, ’Close’, ’Makes a case’), a stand-alone category with space for comments or not present at all (again, presumably on the understanding that discursive feedback is the appropriate medium for such commentary).
This is not to suggest that the pro forma reveal an uncertainty about the intellectual qualities English departments expect from their students’ work. Rather, it is in the endeavour to find definitions of those qualities that both inform (in the way that ’appropriate’ does not) and have wide application across more than one module or assignment. One way in which some pro forma have sought to achieve this is in carefully worded descriptors indicating a range of performance criteria. In one form, for example, an indicator of excellent performance is ’Skilful close critical analysis’ and its corresponding description of poor performance is ’Tendency to generalisation, description or plot summary’. The descriptors here define qualities that both evaluate the assignment in hand and identify general qualities that can be taken into future work. Such descriptors are also more informative for students than forms that provide only one descriptive statement (e.g. ’Relevance to question’) that is assessed by ticking across a range from ’Excellent’ to ’Unsatisfactory’. I suspect they are also more helpful than descriptors that carry only an oppositional statement (’Focussed on the question’ – ’Not focussed on the question’). As one colleague suggested to me, a well-worded template that is blank should be as useful in advance of writing the essay as it is in assessing it afterwards.
Based upon this survey, I have put together a pro forma that brings together what I think are the best qualities from those I received. Putting it into use in a pilot study did reveal some immediate limitations: it was not always appropriate for assessments other than formal essays; its descriptors were not always relevant for English language or creative writing modules. But it is perhaps in the task of trying to author appropriate descriptors for different exercises and subjects – and in the process of sharing such efforts at definition among the wider subject community – that we can achieve a greater clarity on what defines our subject both for our students and for ourselves.
