ABSTRACT
At this point of the book, assuming you’ve read it in the order presented, you’ll be acutely aware of what I call ‘the diversity of diversity’ – that is: the many ways in which our students may differ from each other; the many institutional and disciplinary contexts, the many stages they go in, through and out of higher education, and, therefore, the many ways in which we may respond through the Practitioner Model to help students to have a positive and successful experience. The sheer number of dimensions and possible permutations and combinations is staggering. What may be less clear is the importance of student evaluation and feedback in helping us to do justice to the first principle of the Practitioner Model: specifically that, every student has to be supported in, through and out of every stage of their academic and personal journey at university from first contact until they become alumni (Morgan, Chapter 4, page 43). To begin to clarify this, it is as well to rehearse the fact that there are two distinct ways in which student evaluation and feedback may be used (Nulty, 2012). The first is as a direct and specific means for evaluating students’ learning and providing feedback on how that may be improved. In this context, evaluation and feedback equates to our assessment of students’ learning and the feedback we provide to them. This means a pedagogical and educational focus, in which curriculum design, incorporating the assessment of students’ learning, is at the core. Evaluation and feedback conceived in this way may focus on the learning process and/or learning outcome but, while it is clear that such matters affect the students’ experience greatly, the student experience is not the focus. As noted in the Introduction, this book (and therefore this chapter) mentions but deliberately does not provide details of best assessment or feedback practices used in these ways – there is an existing literature on these matters elsewhere (see Morgan, Chapter 1, page 5). The second way in which student evaluation and feedback may be used is to engage with students in a manner that informs our understanding of students’ views, and how these relate to their experience in the broadest sense, in, through and out of every stage of their journey at university. Using student evaluation and feedback in this way is the focus of this chapter. Before presenting the case studies, I begin by raising some broad considerations about the student evaluation and feedback that pertain specifically to the challenge of supporting diversity in higher education.
