Published on: 23/01/2024 · Last updated on: 02/09/2024
Feedback and feedforward
Feedback focuses on a student’s current performance while feedforward looks ahead to how students can improve both current and subsequent assessments. Feedforward is more effective if it is provided at a time when meaningful action can be taken. Both are fundamental to embedding Assessment for Learning effectively within units and courses.
Common challenges with feedback
Common challenges with feedback reported by students and staff include:
- Students report that they don’t understand the feedback on their work and how to translate this into action.
- Students want more and/or more individualised feedback.
- Staff report that students don’t engage with feedback opportunities (e.g. formative assessment or office hours).
- Staff report that their ability to provide greater quantity and/or quality of feedback is unsustainable.
- Feedback is associated with comments on summative assessment and with justifying a summative mark, rather than improving learning.
- Feedback on an end of unit assessment comes too late and can seem unrelated to future study or work.
- Feedback comments are not specific (e.g. ‘needs work’, ‘unclear’) or focus largely on negative comments.
The guidance on this provides practical approaches to developing effective feedback practice that address the challenges above.
Effective feedback and feedforward practice
The areas below build on research and good practice in assessment and feedback. Together they support students to better understand their assessment tasks and feedback they receive, to engage with feedback opportunities, and to act on this feedback to improve their future performance.
The importance of understanding
In order for students to engage fully in their assessment, they need to understand what they are being asked to do, by when, what key ideas or tasks they need to learn or undertake, and how any formative assessments might feed into the summative assessment.
Challenge
Ensuring students understand the key tasks, timelines, and intended learning outcomes.
Solutions
It is important to make time early on to explain the assessment task(s), when assessments are due, how different assessment tasks fit together, and to develop a shared understanding with your students on the principles underpinning the assessment.Ensure students understand the key tasks, timelines, and intended learning outcomes.
You could:
- Check with your students if they understand what is expected of them (and check this is also explicit in the marking criteria). This is particularly important with assessment methods that they might not have encountered previously.
- Explore existing anxieties with your students and consider approaches that might help them. You could schedule in specific times to do this, or create a forum on Moodle for students to post questions throughout the course.
Tip:
Information about the assessment, due dates, and feedback opportunities can be provided in the Assessment Tab in your unit’s Moodle page. A consistent approach to using this tab across all units on a course will be beneficial.
Challenge
As teachers we are continually providing valuable feedback to our learners throughout our sessions, units and courses. However, our students often don’t recognise this, thinking that feedback only counts when it is in the form of written comments on a piece of submitted work.
Solution
Explicit communication and dialogue with students about the forms of feedback that will be available across their course, and how they can feedforward prior learning and formative feedback experiences to their future performance is a key starting point for promoting engagement.
In addition, at the start of the unit or course communicate to students that they will need to engage in the feedback process actively for it to be valuable for their learning.
You could:
- Check with your students if they understand what feedback or feedforward means, or if they realise when they are being given information and advice about feedback.
- Ask students if information about feedback opportunities is easy to find and clear.
- Work with students to map out the possible feedback and feedforward opportunities coming up in the next period of study, and which of these they might wish to prioritise.
- At the start of a course year or unit, discuss with students how their prior learning (from previous years of study or parallel units), including feedback they have received previously, might feedforward into a particular future assessment task.
- Harness the fact that first-year undergraduate students will be very used to receiving feedback and having to respond to it at as part of the feedback process at school.
- Tell students about your own experience of receiving and acting on feedback (e.g. from journal article reviewers) to improve your own work.
Tip:
The Skills Centre has produced a guide for students on understanding feedbacking and how to use it.
Engage
Supporting students to take an active role in the feedback process will help equip them to become self-regulating, independent learners.
Challenge
Students sometimes find the assessment and/or marking criteria confusing or unclear and can feel detached from the question being set or the overall assignment brief. The criteria may contain terms (or concepts) that they find difficult to understand.
Similarly, students often struggle to differentiate between different levels of work. For example, what ‘good’ looks like in any particular method of assessment and how this differs from ‘excellent’.
Not only does this present barriers to undertaking the assessment, but it can lead to later difficulties in understanding summative feedback and justification for the mark they have received.
Solution
Supporting student understanding of assessment and marking criteria at the start not only supports their ability to undertake the task but also their understanding of formative and summative feedback.
You could:
- Promote discussion with students about the assessment criteria to uncover areas that are unclear or lack understanding. This could be done by integrating a poll into the session and asking them to rate their confidence on a scale of 1-5. Consider whether students are able to contribute anonymously, as this could impact on how honest they are in their responses. Provide space for them to discuss and work with them to ensure the criteria are clear and explicit.
- Ask students to re-write assessment and/or marking criteria in their own words as a ‘student friendly’ version (this could then be shared with next year’s cohort to build on as a resource).
- Demonstrate how you apply the marking criteria to exemplars of work. This does not need to extensive, even a single paragraph can help.
- Provide short exemplars of work for students and ask them to critique them using the marking criteria (or the ‘student-friendly’ versions they have previously created). Ask students what they think is good/bad about the work, what key points are being made, and how well.
- Provide exemplars of work at different levels and draw attention to what underlying features distinguish one from another.
Tip:
You could explore using a marking guide or rubric in Moodle to ensure assessment guidelines and success criteria are clear to markers and students.
Challenge
Students report that they want more individualised feedback. However, staff report that students often fail to engage with feedback opportunities (e.g. formative assessment or office hours) and that the ability to provide greater quantity and/or quality of feedback is unsustainable.
Solution
Students can benefit when provided with opportunities to ‘operate as judges of their own learning’ (Boud & Molloy, 2013, p. 698), by self-assessing their own work (and that of others), and generating feedback. This helps them to build on their understanding of assessment criteria, and how this is applied in practice.
Students’ active role is crucial, and as it is developed should equip them to become self-regulating, independent learners. The staff role becomes less about being the sole provider of feedback comments, and more one that supports students’ understanding and engagement with a range of feedback opportunities. Space for students to discuss, ask questions and practice in a supported environment is recognised as essential.
Peer review activities help students understand the process of making academic judgements and providing feedback to others.
You could:
- Support students to identify how marking criteria has been applied to exemplars of work. For example, ask them to employ the PEEL analysis (Point, Evidence, Explanation, Link) to critique the work and then apply this in their own assessment task.
- Peer feedback can be used where pairs or small groups look over each other’s work during (or outside of) a session and offer guidance about what is good and what could be improved. This necessitates students having a clear understanding of what good work looks like but also how to provide constructive feedback. A good mantra for students is to only offer feedback that is kind, specific and helpful – i.e. aligned to the learning outcomes and supportive of progress. This is a good example of the power of peer feedback being specific in order to support improvement. Provide students with training and support in how to give and use feedback. If undertaking self or peer-review tasks, provide students with explicit instructions on what feedback you want them to give, and what they should do with the feedback.
- Use auto-marked quizzes for timely formative (and summative) self assessment.
- Encourage students to make use of existing PAL schemes, or contact the Students’ Union to discuss setting up a new scheme for your course.
- Create a list of standard questions for students to reflect on based on previous student queries about the assessment. For example, have they addressed the question fully; how well is the work structured for the reader; are references correctly cited?
- Self-assessment skills can be developed through the development of task or summative assignment self-assessment success criteria checklists by small groups or the whole cohort, for example via a shared Google document or Padlet. These self-assessment criteria lists can then be used individually by students to self-check work. In essence, these lists are student interpretations of the task or assignment assessment criteria, and so the inclusion or omission of key aspects of success criteria gives you a good insight into the students’ understanding of the assessment criteria and what this looks like in practice.
Tip:
You could explore using the group peer review tool on Moodle for formative and summative assessments, and ways to support group work and peer assessment online.
Act
Students who understand and are engaged with the assessment and feedback process are well equipped to put this into practice to improve their learning and performance.
Challenge
Students report that they often don’t understand the feedback on their work and how to translate this into action. Relatedly, they might note that feedback comments appear unspecific (e.g. ‘needs work’, ‘unclear’) or focus largely on negative features of their work.
For both students and staff there can be a danger that feedback is strongly associated with comments on summative assessment and with justifying a summative mark, rather than improving learning.
Solution
All types of feedback should be constructive, specific, and supportive. A combination of feedback and feedforward should help students understand learning goals and work towards meeting the intended learning outcomes, which in turn are related to the summative assessment and its assessment criteria.
Ensure comments helpfully support students to identify areas of strength and ongoing development that they can apply to their next assessment and future work.
You could:
- Action-focused comments could be made on the work in writing, by audio recording, or using screencast recordings and returned to each student. For example, ‘Develop your analysis of the literature you have read by considering how the age and sample size of the study impact on its validity’ helps students to see how they can deepen their analysis, increasing the likelihood that they can act on the feedback provided. Depending on the size of the cohort, it may be that a 5-10 minute discussion on the piece of work with the student is more efficient.
- General whole-cohort feedback could be provided based on common issues that you pick up when looking through the students’ submissions, for example, incorrect referencing style, incorrect use of SI units, a re-explanation of a commonly misunderstood concept. Explain that although this feedback is ‘general’ it is still very useful for each student – it supports them to learn by requiring that they reflect on which aspects of the general feedback apply to their work. Again, this approach shifts the onus onto students. The use of general feedback on common issues can save repeating the same comment frequently.
Tip:
See examples of helpful feedback comments from a range of disciplines and assessment methods. [Forthcoming]
Challenge
Feedback on an end of unit assessment comes too late and can seem unrelated to future study or work. Students often only see feedback in the context of end of assessment comments on their work, and miss other opportunities for feedback during the assignment.
Student perceptions about the timeliness of feedback are often determined by expectations. Clarity about when feedback will be provided is important for managing these expectations.
Solution
You could:
- Set specific dates or check points during the assessment period to get students to reflect on any feedback given, and use it to inform the development of their assignment.
- During the assessment process encourage students to discuss any difficulties they are having and to share questions they have about an assignment.
- Offer short Q&A sessions (either live or via online chat) to respond to student assessment queries.
- Create a list of standard questions for students to reflect on based on previous student queries about the assessment. For example, have they addressed the question fully; how well is the work structured for the reader; are references correctly cited?
- Sharing a clear timeline or map of when formal formative feedback points will occur within a unit is helpful for students to see how formative and summative assessment fits together in the unit. A course-wide approach to planning formal formative assessment points will ensure that students are given enough time to engage with and act on the formative feedback before submission of the related summative assessment. It also ensures that formative deadlines do not clash across the course – too many deadlines at once may mean students choose not to engage with formative tasks due to time pressures and so the opportunity for them to gain formal feedback before the submission of the related summative assessment is lost.
- During and after an assessment, ask students to complete a feedback cover sheet on how previous feedback has helped. At the start of a new assessment, ask students to revisit their feedback cover sheets so they know how to apply their prior learning to the current assessment. King’s College London has a range of examples on interactive cover sheets, and set out the pros and cons of this approach.
Tip:
As a Course team, consider creating a student feedback guide, such as that created by Winstone and Nash (2016).
Further ways to embed effective feedback practice
Recent analysis of NSS feedback across institutions has revealed that many of students’ perceived shortcomings of assessment and feedback could be overcome through better communication between staff and students. The following are suggestions for ways to support your students’ understanding of the feedback process and their role in it.
Formal formative assessment points require students to submit a piece of work by a specified deadline, and feedback on the work is returned. There are some key considerations for embedding formal formative assessment points into your unit, particularly in terms of ensuring that the process is manageable and sustainable for both staff and students:
- Reflect on whether students absolutely need to submit a full draft of an assignment, or whether they could still benefit from the feedback given on 1-2 pages, or a key section of the assignment (e.g. introduction and methods). There needs to be a balance between the feedback process being beneficial for students’ learning, but also being appropriate for the lecturer in terms of the number of students in the cohort and the time they have available for providing feedback.
- Sharing a clear timeline or map of when formal formative feedback points will occur within a unit is helpful for students to see how formative and summative assessment fits together in the unit. These formal formative points can be added onto your overall course assessment map.
- A course-wide approach to planning formal formative assessment points will ensure that students are given enough time to engage with and act on the formative feedback before submission of the related summative assessment. It also ensures that formative deadlines do not clash across the course – too many deadlines at once may mean students choose not to engage with formative tasks due to time pressures and so the opportunity for them to gain formal feedback before the submission of the related summative assessment is lost.
Informal formative approaches may include:
- Encouraging students to discuss any difficulties they are having and to share questions they have about an assignment. This could be via a Moodle forum or short Q&A sessions (either live or via online chat).
- Setting specific dates or checkpoints during the assessment period for students to reflect on any feedback given, and use it to inform the development of their assignment.
- Embedding hinge questions to help you very quickly ascertain how much the students understand and how their learning has progressed. Quick quizzes are a rapid and simple way of embedding hinge questions into your session to allow all students to participate in the activity. This then allows you to respond and adapt your teaching as necessary or signpost students to further support (for example, existing resources housed on Moodle).
- Promoting shared or individual documents that bring together the progress students are making in their learning can be powerful. For example, ‘Know Want Learnt’ (KWL) grids focus the student on what they know, what they want to know, and what they have learnt (a KWL grid example is provided here).
- Supporting students to prepare a feedback portfolio in order to reflect and identify strengths and areas for improvement across assessments and units. Digital forms of feedback can be stored and accessed easily.
Assessment and feedback pro-formas can be beneficial if there are large numbers of students, or you want to promote consistency in providing feedback across a unit or course. Pro-formas can provide space for specific feedback and signposting of students to resources to support them to act on the feedback provided This example for lab work highlights strengths, plus three areas to focus on. The areas included in the pro-forma would relate directly to the assessment criteria so students can see their relevance. This approach makes the feedback more manageable and digestible, avoiding overwhelming the students and meaning they are more likely to engage with and act on the feedback.
Further information