Last changed 18 April 2012 ............... Length about 500 words (6,000 bytes).
(Document started on 26 April 2011.) This is a WWW document maintained by Steve Draper, installed at http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/~steve/rap/viva.html. You may copy it. How to refer to it.

Web site logical path: [www.psy.gla.ac.uk] [~steve] [rap] [this page]

Feedback vivas

By Steve Draper, Department of Psychology, University of Glasgow.

The idea and practice of feedback vivas are due to Benjamin Franks. They give significant course credit to students to participating; but they succeed in getting students to engage with feedback on their work, and in dialogue about it.

Tutors frequently complain that written feedback is not being followed by students. This leads to frustration on the part of markers, and failure to improve performance by students. The short feedback viva was devised in response. It is a 10-minute formally assessed viva with a student discussing their written feedback from their previously submitted assignment. The written feedback on the essay is provided several days in advance (usually over a week) by the academics.

They have two teachers in with the one student for this 10 minute viva (important in terms of objectivity etc.). From the staff-time point of view they dropped one of the essays from the course to make room for this, and the effect is slightly less overall marking time (assuming a level 2 essay takes about 40 mins to mark). Most arts-based main campus courses only have one essay, so this could be harder to (economically) justify. However, on courses where it is used perhaps the exam course be removed (or shortened)? More radically, perhaps more resources should be directed to this kind of assessment.

The feedback (gathered by an independent evaluator) from students and staff is strongly positive.

The Feedback Viva is so far only used on the course Issues in Contemporary Society.

Details

The feedback viva has these feedback-related educational goals:

to ensure that students read the comments;
to assist them in identifying strengths and weakness in their work;
to enable the application of the advice to the marked assignment and to future academic work;
to allow the students to reflect on the skills learnt on this course and their wider applicability.
to provide an opportunity for the student to respond to the comments and highlight areas of ambiguity or disagreement with the assessment, thereby encouraging constructive dialogue for both students and academics.

Additionally, I believe it serves other educational goals about:

prompting reflection
engaging students in the course and its work
giving them a sense that the staff care about them and their work: see my notion of "teacher monitoring".

The questions in the feedback viva are:

Do you understand the feedback?
Are there points you need clarification on?
Do you disagree with any of the comments?
What would you say are the essay's main strengths?
What would you say are its weaknesses, and how would you improve these if you could write the essay again?
Are these strengths and weaknesses specific to this essay, or do they represent more general tendencies in your assignments?
What skills (if any) have you learnt on the course?

Also

See a report on this by Franks & Hanscomb on the HEA website. They have given a talk on this, for which slides may be available, as session 6A at the GU Learning and Teaching Conference.

Web site logical path: [www.psy.gla.ac.uk] [~steve] [rap] [this page]
[Top of this page]