Projects

Enhancing Student Feedback in History using ‘Grademark’

Status: in progress

Description

This project will trial the use of the ‘Grademark’ electronic assessment tool in the School of History, integrated within the University’s Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), as a strategy, complementing traditional feedback methods, to improve the quality of feedback on assessed work.

Grademark is a tool that allows online ‘marginalia’, corrections and commentary on electronically submitted assessed work, at present a tool embedded within the ‘Turnitin’ electronic submission system at Leeds. Electronic text feedback within Grademark has potential advantages of being highly legible, adaptable and quickly accessible. It is easily saved, collated and consulted (both by students and staff).
The project will aim to understand the technical, administrative and pedagogical issues involved in using the ‘Grademark’ tool to assess student work and to provide enhanced feedback.
The trial, extending over two years, will at first focus on the use of Grademark for assessment and feedback from the tutor’s perspective, observing the issues in adopting the technology in terms of teaching administration and practice for the tutor, such as online essay submission, tutor marking workload, adapting to online marking, using electronic comments in tandem with of ‘conventional’ written and spoken feedback, building up generic comment ‘banks’, adjusting comments to different levels of study.
As the trial progresses, it will study the impact Grademark feedback has on student learning and awareness of feedback, examining student perceptions of the provision of academic feedback, the rigour, timeliness and usefulness of feedback and measuring students’ consultation of online feedback, use and integration of feedback into future study, perception of electronic feedback in relation to ‘conventional’ written and spoken feedback and satisfaction in NSS History Assessment and Feedback results.
The project will focus on assessed coursework, making it generic enough that its findings can be utilised across the faculty of arts at Leeds, and also History and Arts departments across the HE sector.

Raphael Hallett
University of Leeds
r.hallett@leeds.ac.uk

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