Providing written feedback on students' oral presentations: an analysis

Abstract

Recent reviews on assessment in higher education have emphasised the importance of written formative assessment as part of the process of assessing oral presentation skills, and have identified the need for case studies to investigate the content and character of feedback which students receive. The paper analyses the written feedback provided by teachers who acted as assessors for conference presentations made by engineering students enrolled in a fourth year subject at The University of New South Wales. The study employs content analysis to describe the extent, content, and character of these comments, and to identify which performance skills staff focus on in providing such feedback.