Today we held our workshop with a group of self-selecting Stage One students, looking at feedback and assessment. The day involved some discussion and questionnaires on feedback and assessment as well as a mock assessment exercise geared to take students through the assessment process.

Initial conversation centred on the nature of assessment -the perceptions that it was subjective and questioning whether it could be objective, considering the assessment process and what is important within it, and then how judgements are made and marks awarded. Assessment was seen as useful in giving the student a means to see how they were progressing, but a general discussion on marking raised the fact that it might not be important at all given the nature of an artistic career. When talking about feedback, students raised issues surrounding conflicting feedback and how to deal with this. With regard to feedback, students wanted constructive, rigorous, fair and honest response to their work with guidance on how to improve.

While some students involved in the mock assessment exercise didn’t seem to gain much or change opinions as a result of this, others found that it encouraged them to think more widely about feedback and its modes – from staff, from peers (through crits or self-initiated), it helped them see their work more objectively and constructively, for some it reordered priorities from seeing assessment as more important to then prizing feedback, and for others it reinforced that there was no ‘right’ way of doing it (a formula to get a grade) it was about development and progression in forging their own way of working. Feedback was seen more as guidance rather than instruction and something to which the student could adopt their own position. Students found experiencing the process of assessment and of producing feedback, clarified their understanding of criteria, around which they welcomed discussion.

When asked what form of feedback students found most useful, it’s perhaps not surprising that students did not rate the percentage or grade mark particularly highly and, while seen as more useful than a grade mark, written feedback was perceived less useful than verbal forms of feedback – through informal chats with peers, comments from external visitors, group crits/discussions or individual tutorials.

The students have given us considerable food for thought through their subsequent discussion on why particular forms of feedback work better than others. Interestingly, as we are currently undertaking a multi-stranded literature review, much of their perspectives and experiences sit against the general literature on feedback and assessment which again points toward the specificity of creative practice pedagogy.

This morning I read a report about creative disciplines and the NSS. It posited the notion that the questions in the NSS are perhaps not best suited to the pedagogy of creative practices. Creative practices did not fair too well in areas such as ‘organisation and management’ and, reflecting most disciplines, ‘feedback and assessment’. It raised questions as to whether the nature of practice-led degrees, such as Fine Art, where students pursue a largely self-initiated and directed (albeit supported) path of learning, within a structure less rigid than traditional academic counterparts means that they seem less organised and managed. Often tutors arrange their own teaching with individual or groups of students, and cross-year activity, which can take some negotiation, can happen at flexible times. A general undertone throughout was the need to better communicate to students about both the what the NSS is, but also what we do and why we do it. The more surprising one is perhaps feedback and assessment given that the basic pedagogy of studio-based teaching is, in one way or another, driven by iterative feedback whether that be through crits, one-on-one tutorials with staff or visitors, peer discussion, ‘studio cruising’, or the more traditional lecture and seminar formats. This chimes with some of our own research which is indicating a varied perspective of what constitutes feedback amongst staff and students, and also the need to better discuss with students what both staff and students expect from feedback. A recurring refrain is the need for better communication. In order to explore this further, we’re in the process of arranging a feedback workshop for our new Stage 1 cohort on a self-selecting basis to look at issues such as feedback, assessment criteria, and assessment processes. We’re interested in gauging opinions on feedback/assessment at the outset, then running them through a mock assessment exercise (including the compilation of feedback) and then seeing if the exercise changes expectations.