Whether you are teaching a tutorial class of 20 students or a large lecture group of 500 students, there are ways in which we can provide feedback that will be beneficial to your students. In this section, we take a closer look at how to design feedback that helps students to learn better.

Strategy 1: Helping students to understand and interpret feedback

• Consider posing the following questions as part of assignment feedback to prompt students to focus or reflect on the feedback message:
  • What are you satisfied with about your work?
  • What was identified as an area of strength in your feedback by the assessor?
  • What was identified as an area for improvement in your feedback by the assessor?
  • What would you like to improve on?
  • What resources do you need to achieve this?
• Start a conversation with students on what constitutes ‘engagement’ with feedback. Revisit an assignment with written feedback or using a rubric for a performance task as a starting point, discuss with students what feedback engagement might look like, and to uncover why students may find this process challenging.
• Identify and categorise the types of feedback you have provided by looking back through the feedback comments given to your students in the past. Consider what actions your students would take in relation to the feedback. How accessible and actionable is your feedback? Is there a pattern in terms of the type of feedback that you preferred and students’ feedback engagement?

Here is a list of feedback types to help you with your categorisation.

Strategy 2: (re)Designing assessment tasks to facilitate uptake of feedback

Assessment tasks should be designed in such a way that students have the opportunity to make use of their feedback in subsequent tasks. This requires careful and thoughtful planning of feedback cycles during the learning process, i.e., when and how feedback is integrated into learning activities, assignments and assessments.

One way to do this is to arrange assessment tasks with some degree of overlap of learning outcomes and criteria for a particular course unit or topic. For example, an essay can be designed as involving multiple stages – First submission includes an outline, the second submission is a written draft and the final submission consists of the full completed written essay. In this way, learning from feedback becomes meaningful as there is an opportunity to apply the knowledge/skills in the subsequent assessment. A nested assessment design is seen as more effective for feedback uptake than one whereby the tasks are independent of each other (e.g. topical tests that are not linked).

Using formative assessment

As teachers, we tend to design assessments to evaluate students’ learning at the end of a topic, unit or course. This terminal form of testing or examination allows us to provide a grade or overall mark in order to ascertain how well students’ have performed for the entire course. While this serves a summative purpose, by providing a ‘snap-shot’ of what students are able to accomplish at that point in time, it does not give a fuller picture of students’ learning and most importantly, there is little opportunity for on-going formative feedback to guide and support learning, during the learning process.

To engage students with feedback means they need to interpret and use it in a timely and purposeful way. As such, assessment needs to be (re)designed in such a way that allows students to access the feedback as they need it and to also have the opportunity to use the feedback in subsequent work.

Here are some formative assessment strategies to help you engage students with feedback (adapted from William & Thompson, 2008). Feedback is meaningful if it helps to:

• Establish where the learner is – clarify, share and communicate clearly the learning intentions, e.g., provide students with clear intended learning outcomes and align assessment tasks and questions with learning outcomes. This can be done in a number of different ways; besides teacher exposition, peers can help one another to understand learning outcomes through collaborative learning activities. Students, themselves, could also identify learning outcomes as part of self-assessment.
• Establish where the learner is going – this involves creating learning activities that promotes student interactions through discussions, sharing of ideas, collaborative problem-solving and critical discourse, which helps to elicit evidence of learning. In most cases, peer learning strategies are used to “activate students as learning resources for one another”. A good example is the use of peer review and feedback during writing and presentation tasks. Here, individual students can also self-assess or self-evaluate to find out where they are in their learning, which is important to foster self-regulation of learning.
• Establish how to get there – this is a crucial step in any formative assessment process, which implies that feedback information should help students to close their learning gaps and to move learning forward. Again, we can leverage on peers or students themselves to co-construct or construct ways to address their learning needs.