Surfacing the complexity of students’ experiences of assessment and feedback processes using a rich picture approach

Abstract

Student-staff dialogue is often emphasised as a means of improving students’ engagement with assessment and feedback processes. However, focusing on dialogue alone overlooks the complexity of students’ experiences and the sociomaterial contexts in which they occur. To surface the roles of the social and the material in students’ experiences, we engaged pedagogies of mattering theory, and employed a rich picture (RP) approach in which students visually depicted their experiences of assessment and feedback. We anticipated that making use of a range of icons, symbols, and visual metaphors might enable participants to think about what matters in their everyday experiences, moving beyond solely human–human interactions, to highlight the significance of the objects, spaces and material elements that are involved. RPs were analysed using a form of content analysis and the following recurrent motifs were identified: Visual metaphors depicting uncertainty; emotive faces showing impacts on wellbeing; seasons, clocks and calendars depicting the pervasiveness of processes; and figures and objects depicting human and non-human elements. Based on the findings, we argue for a shift to greater embedding of meaningful relational approaches in assessment and feedback processes.