What Makes Good Feedback

Informal feedback is made up of speech, gestures and tone of voice. It is often provided during learning and encourages interaction with the student.
Formal feedback is most often written and provided to the student without the lecturer being present, it is easier for the student to misunderstand or misinterpret as they don't have the ability to ask questions of the person providing the feedback.

Students can give feedback to themselves or each other, providing they learn how to do this effectively. This practice not only increases their understanding of assessment criteria but also empowers students to take ownership of their learning process. Developing these skills enhances their ability to interpret and act on written feedback, making them more independent and reflective learners.

See also: Peer Assessment

Generic and targeted feedback can be provided to students in a variety of ways via ReCap Personal Capture, Canvas, Turnitin Feedback Studio​ and peer assessment exercises.
Feedback may be provided to the whole cohort, especially before students submit assignments highlighting commonly made mistakes and misconceptions, and encouraging them to look at their work critically to make sure they have avoided these pitfalls.

Feedback during learning may consist of praise and encouragement, but to be effective should also be about posing questions which will enable the students to reconsider the choices they have made, guide them towards the appropriate response, enable them to recognise a diversity of responses etc.

Feedback after learning is about encouraging the student to think about the ways in which they reached their results or conclusions; to consider what paths others took to get to the same or different ends; to see if there is any consensus of approaches and conclusions; to highlight common pitfalls and good practice and to link this to the next

Assessment and feedback are integral to supporting effective student learning.

• Set expectations for students and staff on assessment, how feedback is given and how to make use of it
• Use examples from student work to demonstrate how marking criteria are applied
• Include assessment information in handbooks and the institutional virtual learning environment
• Consider using self- and peer-assessment to improve students’ assessment literacy
• Ensure that the language used to describe assessment is clear, concise and appropriate for each stage

Effective and efficient assessment and feedback must be central to the curriculum design process.

• Consider assessment and feedback in the module design process at the same time as content and teaching methods
• Regularly review assessment and feedback at programme level to ensure clear progression from first to final year
• DPD and module leaders should regularly review assessment across a programme
• Review assessments to ensure they address module learning outcomes
• Design assessment that requires students to engage with the subject material

Assessment should be valid, reliable and consistent.

• Appropriate assessments should be part of a moderation process to help ensure consistency and reliability of marking
• Review assessments to make sure that they reliably and consistently demonstrate a student's ability
• Where appropriate, use double marking to ensure that marking is reliable and assessments consistent

Opportunities for feedback and formative assessment will be included in all programmes

• Where appropriate have students take a diagnostic test and use the results to determine what (if any) additional support is required
• Have students work in groups to solve problems and provide feedback to one another
• Ask students to peer assess drafts of written work, developing their ability to give constructive feedback
• Encourage students to work in "buddy groups", or through a mentoring project to provide peer feedback for each other
• Use online tests as a form of formative assessment, and release feedback immediately

Feedback should be high quality and timely

• Use feedback comment banks supplemented by individual comments to provide consistent feedback and save staff time
• Ensure you give feedback that provides guidance on how students can improve future work
• Provide whole cohort feedback to students in person or via the VLE
• With academic guidance, have students devise assessment criteria, mark and provide high quality feedback for low stakes assessment
• Use online tests with automated feedback
• Meet or exceed the University turn around time.  If this is not possible provide an explanation

Forms and methods of assessment and feedback should be varied and appropriate

• Review the curriculum to ensure that a range of assessment and feedback methods are used throughout the programme
• Provide students with a clear opportunity to seek individual feedback on specified aspects of large pieces of work
• When a new assessment method is introduced give students the opportunity to practice it

The University will provide the appropriate environment and resources to ensure staff and students are supported adequately

• A range of workshops for staff are available from LTDS. Likewise, staff can call upon the expertise and resources developed by LTDS
• Technology to support assessment and feedback - Canvas, Online Assessment and Feedback and Turnitin
• Explore the case studies database to investigate approaches you could adapt for your teaching

Roles and responsibilities for both staff and students will be communicated clearly

• Set out students and staff expectations and roles clearly at the start of the module
• Include assessment information in handbooks and the institutional Virtual Learning Environment
• Signpost students to support to help with their academic skills

The University will monitor and evaluate assessment and feedback through appropriate methods

• Monitoring and evaluation takes place via annual and periodic review of the subject area

Student dissatisfaction with feedback on assessed work can be demoralizing, especially where time has provided that feedback. Part of what could drive this dissatisfaction may be the expectations that students have about feedback or understanding the value of engaging with feedback they receive. As we know feedback isn’t only a written paragraph or annotated script received 20 days after submission. It is important to shift student expectations towards all forms of feedback. 

It is important to prepare students to receive feedback and to communicate: 

• How they will receive feedback – format, individual or group level, which system and where will they find it within that system 
• When they will receive feedback – give a clear date they should expect to receive their feedback and if for any reason it is delayed – communicate this delay and when they will receive it 
• Why is it important to engage with feedback – often students don’t engage in end of module feedback if they are moving on to a new module as they don’t see the connections between modules – give an overview on the purpose of the feedback given 

Don’t assume students know where to find and retrieve their feedback and marks. It may be useful to discuss in your programme/module teams how you might be more consistent in the information you give to your students on where they can find their marks and feedback, and what your local expectations are for when to expect feedback to appear, and how your students can make the best use of this feedback for their next assessed piece of work. 

Feedback will be effective once you’ve established a common understanding of what feedback is with your students, and what it is for. Students may struggle to follow the assessment criteria and the academic language so be clear in your expectations. Make sure your students know why they are getting feedback and how their learning can be improved by reflection. 

Here are a few ideas for preparing your students for feedback: 

• Create a student guide for your course 
• Use annotated examples in class 
• Give the students their own work or example assignments to mark and annotate against the criteria

Student facing resources on feedback

See Get Ready to Study to view a collection of resources specifically tailored to supporting new undergraduate students with the transition to university. The resources have been developed by the University Library in collaboration with students and provide Stage 1 undergraduates with essential skills for their first year at university. These resources can be embedded in Canvas, used in teaching or accessed independently by students.

You could share:

• Making the most of your feedback - A (2:40 min) video featuring current University students who share how they use feedback to improve their work.
• Receiving feedback on your work An interactive resource providing students with advice on how to process receiving feedback on their work, written in collaboration with Student Wellbeing.

Use Canvas Commons to download the resources to your Canvas Course. (In Canvas Commons - search for Get Ready to Study.) 

The student population is diverse, and as such disability, neurodiversity, caring responsibilities, cultural and religious backgrounds, prior experience and learning preferences will affect individual learning experiences and ways in which students: 

• Perceive feedback 
• Access feedback 
• Value feedback 
• Use feedback 

It is therefore helpful to consider these diverse backgrounds to guide ways in which you can consider inclusive approaches to provide meaningful and inclusive feedback for students.   

Anonymous marking practice means it is not possible to identify the individual needs of students, and particularly those of disabled students who may experience specific challenges when accessing feedback. Some specific information and resources can give a broad understanding of the barriers and challenges disabled students can experience but we acknowledge that this has its limitations. What may be more valuable is how we can consider co-creation opportunities that allow students to tell us how they would like to receive feedback.  

Information and resources about supporting disabled students are: 

• Student Support Plans (SSPs) 
• Supportive practice tools 
• Information sheets 

Examples of where particular feedback format may be helpful to students: 

• A student with dyslexia may prefer audio feedback over written as it may take them less time to listen and understand feedback if they experience word decoding issues and have slower reading speeds. But this may also be applicable for students whose time is impacted in other ways e.g. those with caring responsibilities, commuter students or students who may experience fatigue due to long term health or mental health conditions. 
• A student with an Autism Spectrum Condition will value clear, unambiguous feedback that is clearly stated and placed next to text it relates to. 

We cannot control how students perceive feedback, but awareness of challenges with, for example, spelling and grammar that may be directly attributed to a disability, should guide us to providing feedback that is: 

• Sensitive to the potential reasons for the errors 
• Constructive, pointing out what has been done well and what needs improving 
• Raises awareness of sources of support to develop academic and core literacy skills 
• Fosters student understanding of the purpose of feedback 

• Fosters students to employ self-reflection and utilise development opportunities 

So, whilst there is no single form of feedback that will universally meet the needs of, or be valued by all students, balancing what you know about your student cohort with forms of feedback and tools available to you, will help you to consider and select the most effective forms of feedback for access and engagement. 

Here is Sarah Graham talking about feedback (5.5 minutes). This comes from the NEPS module on Giving Effective Feedback. 

Each feedback technique has its advantages and drawbacks, but what we can think about is how to make the feedback we give to students useable and accessible. Accessibility encompasses:

• Format of feedback
• Tools
• Retrievability: where/when and how students access their feedback

The format of feedback can influence how students use and access feedback. Awareness of learner differences can create opportunity for feedback efficiency that may enhance student utility with feedback. Think about each format and the potential value and accessibility students may attribute to it:

• General written summary
• Specific, in text comments
• Audio clip
• Video clip
• Verbal summary

According to Phil Race (2014) there is no such thing as perfect feedback; each feedback technique has its advantages and its drawbacks. He has suggested that a key factor in selecting the most appropriate form of feedback for yourself and your students is to consider the balance or payoff between feedback efficiency for you and learning payoff for students.

Show your students how to use feedback by modelling and using feedback yourself in seminars or tutorials. Teach students the skills to self and peer assess as this will give students ownership, increase engagement and help students to answer their own questions. You will also be developing students' own self-regulation skills. 

Students are asked to reflect on a task they have just completed. 

1. Students are asked to work alone to write the characteristics of a good piece of work. 
2. They then get together in pairs and combine their criteria. 
3. The pairs get into fours and combine their criteria into an agreed list. 
4. The teacher then asks each group of four in turn for one criterion, and comments on this, writing it up if it is useful. If it is not useful, the teacher asks for improvement of the criterion from another group and explores any misconceptions. 
5. Gradually an agreed set of good criteria are developed and explained. Misconceptions can now be corrected (which is a key advantage of this approach) and the real goals explained. 

The student studies several pieces of anonymous student’s work. This can be genuine, or it might have been produced by the teacher specifically for this activity. As well as this work, students are given model answers and mark schemes, and they are asked to assess the work. The teacher asks the students to give their opinions of the work, concludes strengths and weaknesses, and draws attention to different strategies used by the students. Students compare their marking with the teacher's. 

This activity is a little like peer assessment but is more informal. Students must show their work to a peer or peers and explain their approach. This is common in Art and Design and could be used elsewhere. It helps students to see alternative ‘ways of doing it’. 

You can ask students to explain the process that is ‘how they did it’ and ‘why I did it that way’ as well as the product: ‘what I produced’. 

Start with a clear outline of the success criteria. Students listen to presentations from individuals or groups. Ask each individual to write down one ‘strength’ and one area needing improvement. Students then receive large amounts of peer feedback. 

Hand out a coloured sheet of paper with numbered feedback responses on it pertinent to the assessment task. For example: 

• Illustration of what is expected as evidence of achievement of each of the intended learning outcomes 
• Likely mistakes 
• Features of a good answer 
• Frequently needed explanations 
• Things you otherwise would have to write time and time again on students’ work, e.g. commonly used feedback comments. 

Agree on a clear deadline for submission of work, giving date and time. Within the class, give out the coloured sheets and give students a few minutes to read it. Pick one or two key points from the coloured sheet and spend a few minutes talking through these points to the whole group, adding a personal touch. When marking the work, make use of this sheet, directing students to, for example, ‘See point 4, Blue sheet’ – this will take much less time than writing points out in full repeatedly to different students. 

Well-designed MCQs can have pre-written feedback for each choice, this can form bespoke formative feedback. 

There is detailed support available on using assessment feedback tools in Canvas including assignments, online marking and feedback, with detailed instructions for all the options available to you. 

If you have not looked at the Canvas Orientation course recently it may be useful to take a fresh look. All colleagues have access – look in your Dashboard once logged in to Canvas. You should have the Canvas Orientation in your Published Courses list. You might like to revisit the section on Online Marking and Feedback which outlines Speedgrader and Gradebook features. 

There are helpful tips and case studies on using Turnitin Feedback Studio within Canvas. See more information on Turnitin on Digital Technologies: Turnitin.

• Ellis, Janice. Et al. 2020. Understanding dental students’ use of feedback. European Journal of Dental Education, 2020, Vol.24 (3). https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eje.12524 
• Killingback, C et al. 2018. ‘It was all in your voice’ - Tertiary student perceptions of alternative feedback modes (audio, video, podcast, and screencast): A qualitative literature review. http://eprints.bournemouth.ac.uk/31504/1/C%20Killingback%20et%20al%202018.pdf 
• Nicol, David and Macfarlane-Dick, Debra. 2006. Formative assessment and self-regulated learning: A model and seven principles of good feedback practice. Studies in Higher Education v31(2): 199-218. 
• Race, P. (2019). The Lecturer's Toolkit: A Practical Guide to Assessment, Learning and Teaching (5th ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429060205 
• Sadler, D. R. 1989. Formative assessment and the design of instructional systems. Instructional science, 1989-06-01, Vol.18 (2), p.119-144 
• Assessment and feedback higher education landscape review: survey outcomes, Jisc, March 2022. Accessed 10 March 2022 
• Principles of good assessment and feedback, Jisc, March 2022. Accessed 10 March 2022. 

• Contact LTDS (ltds@ncl.ac.uk) to find out about in-school workshops we can run to support assessment and feedback.

• You could signpost to the ASK website section for students on Understanding and interpreting your feedback and include materials in your course (eg the video on Building on your assessment feedback)
• See Get Ready to Study to view a collection of resources specifically tailored to supporting new undergraduate students with the transition to university.  This has a section on Responding to feedback
• The Learning and Teaching podcast on feedback has a lot of useful student focussed information.