Key messages to take away

1. Design assessment so that feedback has a ‘landing place,’ i.e., somewhere for students to apply it. If an assessment task comes at the end of the year and there are no further assessments, facilitate the revisiting of that feedback prior to a relevant assessment the following year.
2. Try to frame feedback comments in ways that are ‘actionable’. For example, saying ‘your writing is not clear’ does not offer a clear call to action, whereas ‘find all long sentences and consider how you could rewrite them into shorter, clearer sentences’ does.
3. Consider how and where you can engage students in activities that enable them to develop the skills underpinning effective use of feedback. You might find this Developing Engagement with Feedback Toolkit (DEFT) useful to get ideas for implementing effective use of feedback (Nash and Winstone, 2016).
4. We all find using feedback challenging – not just students. We can support students’ use of feedback by sharing our own experiences of receiving and using feedback and, sharing the strategies that we have found useful in our own work.

References:

Nash, R. A. and Winstone, N. E. (2016). The Developing Engagement with Feedback Toolkit (DEFT). Advanced HE.  [Online].