How do Students Know What They Don’t Know? Embedding Formative Feedback to Enhance the Student Learning Experience

This symposium will celebrate and share good practice addressing the issue of troublesome knowledge – knowledge that is difficult, counter-intuitive or ‘alien’ (Perkins 1999). Teaching in HE often requires students to consider previously encountered material in new ways and one of the greatest challenges is helping students make this qualitative shift. Students are often not aware of the need to develop new approaches to learning; recognition of a gap in one’s knowledge is a high level skill which develops with self-reflection. In Psychological Sciences, the need to engage students in this process has led to the development of innovative teaching approaches with a common core: the embedding of formative tasks within and across modules, to increase the uptake of feedback by students. This symposium will showcase examples of this approach including:
1.Patchwork Text Assessment
2.Development of a student-led feedback sheet
3.Practicing report writing across level 4 modules