Initiative Lead
University of Limerick

Primary Contact
Dr Arlene McCurtin
Arlene.mccurtin@ul.ie

€50453

Enhancement across Disciplines

Assessment of students in higher education increasingly emphasises the developmental role of assessment. Thus, the generation of meaningful feedback by teachers on student’s work is necessary to guide student’s future learning and performance.

The School of Allied Health at the University of Limerick have introduced written feedback practices on their professional qualification programmes of Dietetics & Nutrition, Occupational Therapy, Physiotherapy and Speech & Language Therapy. However, a central problem remains. For written feedback to be effective it must be used by the student for whom it is intended otherwise the learning value is diminished. While students are often keen to view grades this is not necessarily true for written feedback.

This T&L intiative is a systematic attempt to improve this situation and aims to develop the use of feedback through building feedback systems Feedback from all the student’s assessments across all modules and teachers during the semester will be synthesised so that individualised core learning points are identified to help students target central learning issues which may be impacting overall student performance. This will be agreed in student-teacher meetings with learning actions decided. The process will encourage students and teachers to form learning partnerships and encourage students to be active participants in their own learning.

Individual student e-portfolios will be hosted on the university’s internal website to support this exercise. We will provide student and staff training on the systems and retrieve student and staff perspectives to guide further development of the feedback system.