As an Academic Tutor you should:
- support students to review and reflect holistically on feedback they have received on assessed work, developing their ability to build on knowledge and progress successfully
- work with students to identify consistent patterns in feedback (e.g. poor referencing/structure, insecure research base etc)
- discuss the steps they can take to improve their performance in future assessments
- signpost students to academic support resources, e.g. Study Advice guides and tutorials
As an Academic Tutor you are not expected to read your students’ work and give them additional feedback, but rather to ensure that they understand the feedback they have already been given, are able to spot any patterns in feedback across different assignments, and can identify ways of using the feedback to improve future assignments.
Resources to help you in your role:
The following videos are from a presentation given by Dr Naomi Winstone (University of Surrey) in March 2020, titled “Facilitating students’ use of feedback for their academic, personal and professional development”.
Slides from the presentation are available here.
Barriers to Engagement with Feedback
Introducing the DEFT, Reflecting on Feedback and Managing Emotional Responses
Synthesising and Taking Action on Feedback
This video shows a student and Academic Tutor talking about the benefits of discussing feedback in tutor meetings. This video is available for students to view on the Essentials Tutor Toolkit.
Useful links:
The Developing Engagement with Feedback Toolkit (DEFT) – this resource, produced by the HEA (now AdvanceHE), contains some material that could form a very useful basis for conversations with tutees around feedback, and some ideas for activities that could be carried out in group tutorials. There is a section titled “How to use feedback effectively – a guide for students“, along with some printable sheets that can be used to help students reflect on their feedback, synthesise feedback over several assignments, and develop an action plan to use their feedback effectively.