On Wednesday 16^th December, the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit will host their next Mini Conference.

We are delighted to announce that Dr Naomi Winstone from University of Surrey will be giving a presentation:

From Transmission to Transformation: Maximising Student Engagement with Feedback

Even the highest-quality feedback on students’ work will not have an impact on their development unless students actively engage with and implement the advice. The literature, alongside anecdotal reports of educators, often paint a negative picture of students’ willingness to read and enact feedback. My recent programme of research has focused on students’ cognitive, motivational, and emotional landscapes and how they influence the ways in which students receive, process, and implement feedback on their work. In this talk, I will argue that maximising students’ engagement with feedback is fundamentally an issue of design, where opportunities for students to develop the skills required for effective use of feedback, and opportunities to apply feedback, can transform the role of students in assessment. In particular, I will share a toolkit of resources that we developed in partnership with students to support the development of feedback ‘recipience skills’. Through this approach, I demonstrate how the responsibility for ensuring that feedback has high impact can, and should, be shared between educators and students.

Naomi is a cognitive psychologist specialising in the processing and impact of instructional feedback and the influence of dominant discourses of assessment and feedback in policy and practice on the positioning of educators and students in feedback processes. Naomi is a Reader in Higher Education and Director of the Surrey Institute of Education at the University of Surrey, UK. She is also an Honorary Associate Professor in the Centre for Research in Assessment and Digital Learning (CRADLE) at Deakin University, Australia. Naomi is a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a UK National Teaching Fellow.

You can read more about Naomi’s work on feedback in her new book, Designing Effective Feedback Processes in Higher Education: a Learning-Focused Approach (2020), co-written with David Carless.

In addition to Naomi’s presentation, we also have some presentations and workshops from staff at Aberystwyth University. You can register for the Mini Conference by filling out this online form. The full programme will be released shortly.