Helen Pokorny

Complexity, cues and relationships: Student perceptions of feedback

This article discusses issues relating to the effectiveness of feedback and the student perspective. The study described provides rich data relating to student perceptions of useful feedback, their perceptions of feedback cues and their feelings about the importance of feedback relationships in the process. The outcomes suggest that written feedback is often not the most effective tool for helping students to improve their learning. The students in this study had much broader perceptions of useful feedback. Their perceptions challenge some of the assumptions that might be seen to underpin auditing approaches to monitoring the quality of feedback such as that of the National Student Survey.

Widening participation in higher education: student quantitative skills and independent learning as impediments to progression

The UK governments widening participation strategy, and the concomitant development of a mass higher education system, has imposed a variety of pressures on higher education institutions. Not least of these is the changing nature of the student population, and the assumptions that can be made about its skills and knowledge base. It should not be surprising that this rapid expansion of the higher education system has resulted in declining student progression and retention rates. This paper takes a case study approach and attempts to identify the range of factors that might explain the variability of student performance on a first year undergraduate introductory statistics module. The paper concludes that there are no simple predictors of success or failure. However, there is evidence to suggest that any innovations in delivery need to take account of individual student development and that the presumption that students can rapidly become independent learners upon initial entry to higher education is an unrealistic one.

Portfolios and meaning-making in the assessment of prior learning

The take-up of the Assessment of Prior Experiential Learning (APEL) by students in the UK remains low. In exploring why this might be the case, this article seeks to examine the process of preparing claims for APEL, with the objective of understanding what is involved and how the process is experienced by some students with prior professional learning. It suggests that APEL portfolios operate as boundary objects working at the edges of communities of practice and mediating their external relationships. It uses an academic literacies methodology to understand how these relationships are mediated, drawing on the notions of addressivity and dialogicality derived from the work of Bakhtin to analyse data from interviews about the production of APEL portfolios. The analysis—derived from in-depth interviews with four students who achieved APEL credits and the four tutors who assessed them—illustrates the different ways in which the approaches taken by the tutors determined the way in which the APEL portfolio assessment was adapted to meet tutor needs. The tutor approaches also affected the sense of agency that students felt they had through the process and impacted on their identity both as a professional and as a learner. The findings have implications for practice in demonstrating how a dialogic approach to assessment can serve to promote APEL and suggest that recognising the multimodality potential of an APEL portfolio can play a role in mediating relationships and negotiating mutual understanding thus opening up the academy to new sites of knowledge.