What Makes Good Feedback
NEW: A vision for education and skills at Newcastle University: Education for Life 2030+
Feedback should be a two-way dialogue rather than a simple one-way critique, enabling students to positively engage in - and learn from - the assessment process. Feedback should clearly link to module and programme learning outcomes and encourage students to reflect upon their performance and consider how to improve.
For feedback to be effective we need to consider:
- Timing: Feedback during a learning experience can deepen a student's understanding and ensure bad habits are eliminated immediately.
- Sensitivity: It is vital that you consider the individual when giving student feedback. The classroom will be diverse in learners and this must be considered when delivering feedback.
- Be specific: Target the comments to the learning outcomes, that way students have a clear expectation for themselves. Students can also gain confidence in how to improve and to join in a dialogue with the assessor.
- Constructive: Feedback should highlight ways in which the student could improve and what they need to reflect upon. Your relationship with the student will have a great impact on how they receive feedback.
- Focused: You should always ensure the comments made on assessment are on the product of work and not the student.
- Reflective time: Try to return written papers or tests at the beginning of a seminar or tutorial. This allows students time to reflect, ask any necessary questions and have a discussion.
Principles for effective feedback
Jisc's Principles of good assessment and feedback (March 2022) are:
- Principle one - help learners understand what good looks like
- Principle two - support the personalised needs of learners
- Principle three - foster active learning
- Principle four - develop autonomous learners
- Principle five - manage staff and learner workload effectively
- Principle six - foster a motivated learning community
- Principle seven - promote learner employability
In the text below we draw on feedback guidance from this document, our NEPS module on Effective Feedback and the findings from our Assessment and Feedback sprints.
1. Prepare Students for Feedback
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
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.)
2. Learner Differences and Personalisation
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:
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.
4. Format
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.
Strategies
Here are suggested activities you could use with your students to improve student clarity and use of feedback.
Modelling
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 the engagement and help students to answer their own questions. You will also be developing students' own self-regulation skills.
Snowballing assessment criteria
Students are asked to reflect on a task they have just completed.
- Students are asked to work alone to write the characteristics of a good piece of work.
- They then get together in pairs and combine their criteria.
- The pairs get into fours and combine their criteria into an agreed list.
- 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; it from another group and explores any misconceptions.
- 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.
Specimen assignments
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.
Explaining my work
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’.
Verbal Peer Assessment on presentations
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.
Speedy 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 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.
Multiple choice questions (MCQs)
Well-designed MCQs can have pre-written feedback for each choice, this can form bespoke formative feedback.
Audio feedback
Using audio feedback can engage students and gives students a bespoke rationale behind their grade. Audio recordings can be made, edited and uploaded quickly and easily at your desk through ReCap. Turnitin also allows voice comments.
Online tools
Canvas and Turnitin have tools to support assessment. These are particularly useful for providing immediate feedback, increasing the accessibility of feedback, and are great for feeding back on large cohorts.
You may wish to take a holistic look at how you approach feedback in your modules/programme. There are some practical tools which can help you use the feedback functions in Canvas as well as some tools for looking at feedback in your modules or programme. Taking a little time to explore the functions in these tools may save you time and help support more personalised feedback, which is of the highest value to students.
Assessment Feedback tools in Canvas
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.
Turnitin Feedback Studio
There are helpful tips and case studies on using Turnitin Feedback Studio within Canvas.
Other places students can get marks/feedback:
- NESS
- Student Portal
Retrievability: Where/when/how do students access their feedback
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.
Considerations
One point that has been reflected consistently in student comments on feedback in that it is not always clear where they should look for their marks and feedback, or indeed how they should find and make the best use of their feedback.
There are several options for how you give feedback to students, which enable diversity of choice to support the diversity of the student cohort, as well as the wide variety of assessment types across disciplines. To help students it will be useful to signpost students to where they can find their feedback, when to expect it and what to do with it once they have it.
Feedback on exams is likely to be different to the feedback on assessed pieces of work. It will be helpful to students to outline these differences and to manage expectations about if and how exams feedback will be dealt with. There is detailed support on dealing with feedback on exams.
Professor David Nicol explains how students can be guided to make comparisons and feedback on their own work, rather than relying on instructor comments, for improved learning outcomes in this THE Campus article.
Professor David Boud: Redesigning feedback involves addressing the feedback literacy of students and staff (YouTube 17.5 minutes)
Professor Chris Rust discusses feedback (YouTube 3.5 minutes)
Further reading
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.
Support available (colleagues)
- The Assessment and Feedback section of the Learning and Teaching site collects together policies, guidance and support in choosing and using digital assessment and feedback tools.
- A workshop has been developed to support feedback focussed discussion based on work done by the Scottish QAA Enhancement Themes, and incorporating recently published guidance from Jisc on assessment and feedback.
- Contact ltds@ncl.ac.uk to find out more.
Student resources
- 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.