What students say about their learning
Feedback as self-regulation
To succeed in your studies and later in the workplace, you need to be able to critically evaluate your own work. Critically evaluating your own work means generating internal or self-feedback about it. When you make a conscious effort to generate your own feedback you become better at self-regulating your own learning, and less dependent on lecturers.
What is internal feedback
Although it is common to talk about feedback as the comments the lecturer provides, these comments only become feedback when students compare them with their own work. Hence what is important in learning is ‘internal’ or ‘self-feedback’. However, when viewed in this way, it is clear that internal feedback can also be generated by comparing your work or performance against other information sources. For example, you might:
- Compare your approach to others’ approaches to a question - generates internal feedback about the merits of alternative approaches
- Compare your written work with a rubric - generates internal feedback about how the work meets standards
- Discuss the work you are producing with others (i.e. compare different ways of thinking about the work) - generates internal feedback about perspectives, biases and gaps in your thinking.
This value of internal feedback in developing independence and a sense of control over learning is reflected in the experience of a student making comparisons during a peer review task:
'[The peer review process] has helped me personally identify the things which I can do well and the things which I can improve on. I think finding out these aspects which need improving by myself has really taught me [their importance,] which I think I wouldn't have gained if I had just been told what needs improving.
In sum, feedback is much broader than lecturers' written comments. Ask your tutors and lecturers how you can use the above approaches in their courses.