Supporting students to use feedback

All this talk about how to give good feedback is null and void unless we support our students to use the feedback we give them. One complaint about providing our students with feedback is that they either don’t collect it, or that they don’t act on it. Well maybe we need to support them to do so. There are a number of ways you might consider doing this. For example:

1. You could ask your students to describe to you how they used the feedback on a draft to improve their final piece of assessment.
2. You could ask students in their next piece of assessed work what feedback they have acted on from their previous piece of assessed work, and then comment on their improvement.
3. You could ask students what they would like feedback on in the piece of assessed work they hand in. If they have asked for specific feedback, they are more likely to look at that feedback.
4. You could ask your students to bring their feedback to class and then ask them to do some work with their peers around the feedback they each received and how they might apply it to the next piece of work.

All of these approaches demonstrate to our students that we think that feedback is important, and that we think that they should see feedback as an important part of their learning too.