{"id":2991,"date":"2025-02-07T15:36:31","date_gmt":"2025-02-07T15:36:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.manchester.ac.uk\/itl\/?p=2991"},"modified":"2026-04-02T09:43:17","modified_gmt":"2026-04-02T08:43:17","slug":"increasing-dialogue-but-not-workload-developing-effective-dialogic-feedback-processes-through-using-interactive-coversheets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.manchester.ac.uk\/itl\/2025\/02\/07\/increasing-dialogue-but-not-workload-developing-effective-dialogic-feedback-processes-through-using-interactive-coversheets\/","title":{"rendered":"Increasing dialogue but not workload: developing effective dialogic feedback processes through using interactive coversheets"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\"HeadshotCraig Davis is a Senior Language Tutor and Academic Leader at the University Centre for Academic English (UCAE) within SALC. He teaches and coordinates a range of courses providing academic language support, primarily for international students. As the assessment coordinator for UCAE, he leads the development and delivery of assessments for pre-sessional programmes. An advocate for assessment for learning, he is proactive in enhancing student and tutor assessment and feedback literacy within the programmes he is involved in. He continually explores ways to make assessment processes more meaningful and student-centered and is keen to engage in discussions on this topic.<\/p>\n

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NSS data consistently seems to show \u2018assessment and feedback\u2019 as being the lowest rated theme in terms of student satisfaction. I want to share an approach taken on our large scale pre-sessional programmes at UCAE that aims to address this by creating a more meaningful and student-centred feedback process.<\/p>\n

Interactive coversheets and dialogic feedback processes<\/h5>\n

One argument for addressing dissatisfaction around feedback is to increase student-tutor dialogue, and I think many would agree \u00a0this is a sensible approach, but may not have the time or resource to build in more dialogue into existing structures.<\/p>\n

Aware of this key constraint, the most resource effective method for us to increase student led dialogue at scale was by introducing interactive coversheets. These are a form of coversheet submitted with a piece of work that aims to elicit some kind of judgement, comment, or request from the student. I then asked tutors to write their feedback on the same coversheet, either by responding to student comments or answering the same questions that guided the student response \u2013 hopefully resulting in student led dialogue, and student driven feedback.<\/p>\n

A look through literature on the use of interactive coversheets will show a number of potential challenges when it comes to meaningful student engagement:<\/p>\n