Key messages to take away

So there are many practical things that we can do to support students’ use of feedback. One of the most simple things that we can do is to design assessments, so that feedback has what David Boud calls a landing place, and this simply means that there’s somewhere for students to use that feedback. So it could be that we’re saying, you’re doing this particular task, you’re getting feedback, comments on that task. Now here’s another assessment where you’re actually able to apply those comments, so that students feel there’s somewhere for that to go. And even if an assessment is occurring right at the very end of an academic year, there are still ways the following year when we can help students revisit prior feedback and use it on an assessment in that following year. Again, to help give it a landing place.

Another thing that we can do is make sure we frame our comments in ways that are actionable, so they really call students to take an action and to respond to those comments. So thinking about framing, we could say to a student “Your writing is not clear,” and that gives them very little to go on. It doesn’t call them to action. But reframing that into a comment that says, “Go through your work, “find all the long sentences, “and consider how you could break them down “into shorter, clearer sentences,” gives them a direct call to action. Third, we can give students the opportunity to develop the skills that support the use of feedback. And we’ve developed a toolkit of resources called the “Developing Feedback with Engagement Toolkit”, which contains a guide to using feedback, a set of workshop resources, and the building blocks of a feedback portfolio, so that students can develop these skills and strategies and feel more confident in what they need to do to make good use of feedback.

And finally, I think one of the most powerful things that we can do as educators is share our own experiences with feedback. We all experience critical feedback, and we all sometimes, always, sometimes we find it difficult to know how to use that information. It can feel overwhelming, and we’re not motivated to do so. So with the strategies that we’ve developed, and even just sharing the fact that we find this difficult too, can normalize the challenge and open up a real space for students and teachers to talk about feedback and work through ways together to use it more productively.

So supporting students’ use of feedback is not just the responsibility of educators and neither is it solely the responsibility of students to engage with feedback they might receive. Feedback is more than the comments that students get. It’s the dialogue and the discussion that goes around it. And it’s the capacity that students have to generate and seek feedback for themselves. So by engaging in responsibility sharing and seeing feedback processes as a partnership between students and staff, it’s able to work together in this way to maximise the impact of feedback.