Effective feedback is information that students find understandable and usable, and helps them to improve their knowledge, skills, motivation, and metacognitive habits to want to do things in a better way.

Rethinking the purpose of feedback

Before we consider what is effective feedback. We need to ask ourselves “What is the purpose of feedback?” If the purpose of feedback is about error-flagging and providing answers or solutions to problems, then it suffices if we know that students have accessed, understood the comments provided and made the necessary corrections. However, if we view feedback as supporting learning, then we need to go one step further to see how well that feedback has led to students’ improvement of learning. This usually involves collecting evidence of the impact of feedback. In other words, our conceptions of feedback itself influence how we see students’ engagement with feedback, which in turn, tells us how effective our feedback is.

Engaging with feedback

For feedback to be effective, students’ need to engage and use the feedback information in productive ways. What skills do students need to better engage with feedback?

Winstone et al. (2017a) suggest to focus on four recipience processes:

• Self-appraisal – the ability to critically assess one’s own attributes, identifying strengths and acknowledging weaknesses and be open to use feedback for self-improvement;
• Assessment literacy – refers to knowledge of criteria, and what is quality work, especially the capacity for evaluative judgement;
• Goal-setting and self-regulation – both skills involve students actively and purposefully planning, monitoring, controlling and reflecting on what they do and how they do with the feedback; and
• Engagement and motivation – students need to be willing to work on the feedback and exert effort to bring about positive changes to their learning.

These skills are not easy to master but with proper training, practice and support, students will be able to hone their ability to make meaningful use of feedback and at the same time, have a more fruitful learning experience.

Overcoming barriers

To help students use feedback effectively, we need to identify and help them overcome barriers, which includes:

• being defensive or turned off by feedback which is given authoritatively, in a demanding tone and without concern for the students’ emotions;
• having difficulty in decoding or making sense of the language used within feedback, i.e., the use of complex terminology in feedback message does not help;
• being unsure or doubtful about which strategy, approach or method to implement the feedback appropriately;
• lacking confidence or agency to act upon feedback when there is a fixed mindset waiting ‘to be told what to do next’; and
• unwillingness to put in effort or hard work to make the changes happen.

Building bridges

A big part of helping students to engage with feedback involves having clarity of what purpose the feedback is serving and developing shared understanding of what to expect when using feedback for learning and improvement.

Teachers play a crucial role by taking responsibility to:

• ensure that feedback message is clear, free from jargon, timely and specific in addressing the needs of learners;
• provide support or ‘scaffolding’ to help students understand, interpret and uses the feedback meaningfully;
• create opportunities for students to use the feedback in subsequent work;
• design assessments that take into consideration how students’ are able to engage with feedback; and
• consider implementing peer and self-assessment, which offers varied opportunities for formal and informal feedback interactions.