The role of feedback

Well-designed and planned feedback is essential to students' learning. However, there are limitations in the conventional ways that universities provide feedback; often it is in the form of tutor-written feedback on individual students' marked work. We need to address the limitations of his approach by building in other kinds of formal feedback from tutors, more frequently and at earlier stages, so that, for instance, comments are received before the end-point, so that they can 'feed forward' (Hounsell et al., 2008) directly into refinements and revisions of future work. It is also important to draw on other sources of feedback including self- and peer review and reflection.

• Do students know when and how they will receive feedback, what form it will take and what you hope they will do with it?
• Do students get tutor feedback soon enough to do something about it?

• What sources of feedback (other than from tutors) are available to your students?

• How do you encourage students to engage with the feedback provided, e.g. use feedback in in-class/online activities, include use of feedback in learning outcomes?

Designing opportunities for informal feedback

Active, collaborative and dialogic approaches to teaching, learning and assessment bring with them an intrinsic supply of feedback to benefit student learning. As students work together, discuss ideas and methods, and interact with teachers they can test out their own ideas and skills, see how other students go about things and begin to absorb the standards an requirements of their subjects. This type of feedback can also be generated through participation beyond the formal curriculum.

Questions to consider:

• How far do your teaching and assessment strategies encourage students to learn together?

• What kinds of productive discussion emerge from students and staff working in collaboration?

• How do you enable students to appreciate disciplinary expectations and understand what counts as good work? Where do you promote and evaluate this 'slow learning'?

• How do you enable students to test out their learning in contexts beyond the classroom?

When thinking about how a learner will respond to and use feedback, it is important to pay attention to the inclusivity of our feedback practices. Ideally, we should aim to provide feedback in a way that is accessible by all learners, without presenting extra challenges for students who have disabilities or who are from educational backgrounds different from the marker's, or the context of instruction.

The video below applies the principles of Universal Design to providing feedback, challenging us to move away from a deficit model of accessibility, under which there is a default approach which has to be modified or augmented in order to be suitable for particular individuals; and towards a universally inclusive approach, where the default approach is designed to work well for everyone. This might mean making sure that what we design is universally accessible, in the form that we release it; or it might mean designing things that have a high degree of flexibility, so individuals can adapt them to their own needs.