Practical things to try

In a recent paper, Malecka et al. (2020) described activities that can be used to develop students’ ‘feedback literacy’.

Winstone and Nash authored a toolkit of resources for educators to use with their students to help develop the skills underpinning the use of feedback (Nash & Winstone, 2016). It contains a student-authored guide to using feedback, a set of activities and resources that can be used in class time to develop the skills underpinning the use of feedback, and the building blocks for a feedback portfolio that encourages students to synthesise multiple pieces of feedback to inform action.

We can also take actions to bring the student voice into feedback:

• We can adopt dialogic approaches to feedback where we talk to students about their work and give them opportunities to ask questions that inform their use of comments.
• We can invite students to request feedback on specific elements of their work, using interactive cover sheets (Bloxham & Campbell, 2010).
• We can build students’ use of feedback into assessment processes, by rewarding students’ engagement (Man et al., 2020).

References:

Bloxham, S. and Campbell, L. (2010). Generating dialogue in assessment feedback: exploring the use of interactive cover sheets. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 35(3), 291-300.

Malecka, B., Boud, D. and Carless, D. (2020). Eliciting, processing and enacting feedback: mechanisms for embedding student feedback literacy within the curriculum. Teaching in Higher Education.

Man, D., Chau, M. H. and Kong, B. (2020). Promoting student engagement with teacher feedback through rebuttal writing. Educational Psychology.

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