Keep calm and carry on! Harnessing the power of inner feedback to help first years develop new knowledge in pandemic times

Sambell, Kay ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8192-8537 and Graham, Linda (2022) Keep calm and carry on! Harnessing the power of inner feedback to help first years develop new knowledge in pandemic times. In: Assessment in Higher Education (AHE) Conference, 22-24 June 2022, Manchester, UK. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

This presentation focuses on the concept of internal feedback (Nicol, 2020) and will explore its application to our own pedagogic practices in Childhood Studies as we (reluctantly) shifted to online pedagogies and assessment practices during the pandemic. First, we will introduce our theoretical approach, and our hypothesis that fostering students’ inner feedback via comparison-making processes might productively support first-year student engagement and transitions in online environments. We will then set out how we deployed this new approach to create ongoing informal feedback opportunities (Sambell et al, 2013) to offer important, manageable and educationally driven strategies in the context of our recent switch to emergency remote undergraduate teaching and assessment. We will present findings from the initial stages of our ongoing pedagogic action research project, which focuses on the ‘wicked issue’ (Ramaley, 2014) of how best to support students to discover a foundational and transformative threshold concept (Land et al, 2006) as they make the transition to the study of childhood at undergraduate level. Explicitly building Nicol’s approach into our redesigned curriculum involved the specific and deliberate design of opportunities for learners which repeatedly followed a weekly cycle of inter-related pedagogic steps. This recurrently involved students in a sequence which involved them producing, comparing, reviewing and reflecting iteratively on increasingly sophisticated scaffolded tasks which aimed to help them compare their assumptions about the reality of childhood with myriad other perspectives. The sequence was accompanied, importantly, by student journaling and the iterative process was threaded throughout the design of asynchronous materials (lectures, tasks, activities, resources on the VLE) and wrapped around with dialogic interactions in the weekly live seminar on Microsoft Teams. The comparative elements included exemplars (Sambell & Graham, 2020), but also extended well beyond them. The approach we developed, and the comparators we used to help student generate new knowledge via comparison-making, will be outlined in the presentation. This will be accompanied by initial findings from the evaluative data gathered, which included stakeholder perspectives (staff and students). Data to illuminate the research questions were systematically gathered via surveys, semi-structured interviews and ongoing documentary evidence and participant-observation, and key themes and issues will be reported.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Departments:	Institute of Education > Initial Teacher Education
Depositing User:	Anna Lupton
Date Deposited:	09 Jun 2023 09:16
Last Modified:	13 Jan 2024 13:31
URI:	https://insight.cumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/7166

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