Providing assessment feedback to pre-service teachers: a study of examiners' comments.

PSYCHOLOGICAL feedback; STUDENT teacher evaluation; NORWEGIAN students; ACADEMIC improvement; EDUCATIONAL outcomes; UNIVERSITIES & colleges; HIGHER education standards

This article reports a study of written feedback comments in the context of teacher education. While feedback is believed to have the potential to improve students' learning, the provision will rest upon educators' and examiners' ability and means to convey details about their assessment. In the context reported here, compulsory feedback beyond the regular grade was introduced to strengthen a teacher education programme at a Norwegian university. The interest of this study is thus to investigate how the examiners managed this task and focuses on their written comments during three consecutive years. A content analysis of 411 individual feedback comments reveals that most of them are written in a formulaic fashion closely related to the grade descriptors for the course. The discussion raises questions about inherent problems with written assessment feedback and how the standardisation of it may limit the informational value for students' learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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