Providing Effective Feedback
Good-quality, comprehensive, and timely feedback is essential for supporting student learning. Assessment should provide students with meaningful information about their progress towards achieving the intended learning. Effective feedback helps students understand what they have done well, identify areas for improvement, and place grades or marks in an appropriate learning context rather than viewing them as an end in themselves.
To provide effective feedback, you should ensure that it is:
- Timely: The sooner you provide feedback, the more effective it is.
Feedback is most effectively provided as soon as practicable after the assessment has taken place, so that any learning from that feedback can still be connected to the assessment content and to enhance student learning. - Useful: Feedback should consist of more than a mark. It should be critical but supportive to learning, in order that it encourages a student's confident scrutiny of their future work.
- Goal Referenced: Feedback should, in as much as can be practically achieved, be directly related to learning outcomes and given assessment criteria, in order that each student is very clear on what was and will be expected of them.
- Accessible: Feedback should not be directed at the student but at their work. Feedback should refer to the positive aspects of the student's work as well as their areas for development.
Feedback literacy refers to the student's capacity to seek, understand, value and positively engage with the feedback that they receive on their assessment.
To help promote feedback literacy, you could consider:
- Pre-feedback training: You could explain to students how feedback is given and how feedback should be interpreted.
- Signpost feedback: Be clear with students on when feedback is being provided.
- Peer feedback: Students can be asked to give feedback on the work of a fellow student, while also receiving feedback on a piece of work from their peers. You could give students feedback on their peer feedback activities to promote further enhancement of student skills in giving and receiving feedback.
- Gibbs, G., & Simpson, C. (2004-5). Conditions under which assessment supports student learning. Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, Issue 1
- Hattie, J. A. (1987). Identifying the salient facets of a model of student learning: A synthesis of meta-analyses. International Journal of Educational Research, 11, 187–212.
- Winstone, N., Boud, D., Dawson, P., & Heron. M. (2021). From Feedback-as-Information to Feedback-as-Process: A Linguistic Analysis of the Feedback Literature. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 47(2), 1–18.
- Boud, D., & Molloy, E. (2013). Rethinking Models of Feedback for Learning: The Challenge of Design. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 38(6), 698–712.
- Chalmers, C., Mowat, E., & Chapman, M. (2018). Marking and Providing Feedback Face-to-Face: Staff and Student Perspectives. Active Learning in Higher Education, 19(1), 35–45.
- Henderson, M., Phillips, M., Ryan, T., Boud, D., Dawson, P., Molloy, E., & Mahoney, P. (2019). Conditions that enable effective feedback. Higher Education Research & Development, 38(7), 1401–1416. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2019.1657807
- Wiggins, G. (2012). Seven Keys to Effective Feedback. Educational Leadership, 70, 10-16.
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