For students to engage with feedback, it first of all needs to be:

• relevant - so that the comments are useful and constructive
• timely - such that they can take comments on board for the next piece of work

This requires staff to give careful consideration to ways in which they provide feedback.

Download and share with your students: Making the most of your feedback (for students)

For feedback to support learning, two processes must take place:

1. Evaluation: students must reflect on and evaluate their own work in the light of the feedback to identify gaps, misconceptions, etc.
2. Knowledge building: students must use the feedback to rectify misunderstandings and construct a better understanding

This does not typically happen automatically. The ASKe project at Oxford Brookes have produced a useful student-facing guide describing three steps to get the best out of feedback.

To develop this further, feedback should be planned in ways that ensure that students are provided with explicit opportunities to respond to, evaluate, and act on it. There are two main ways in which this can be achieved:

Students are required to actively reflect on and engage with the feedback that they received. Examples of this approach include:

• Students evaluating and responding to comments. This could include them putting them into their own words and saying what they will do about them
• When the following assignment is submitted, students are required to say how they used previous feedback
• Sequencing assignments so that feedback is being used (e.g. drafts and redrafts)
• Getting students to ask what they specifically want feedback on when they submit the work

Students make evaluative judgements about the work of peers and provide feedback to each other. In this approach, students generate as well as receive feedback. This requires students to be active, revisit the assessment criteria from different perspectives, evaluate their own knowledge and develop a greater awareness of what good work looks like. The ASKe project produced a very useful, concrete, three-step guide to peer feedback. Among the advantages of peer review are a greater awareness of what feedback is and how to act on it, more prompt and diverse feedback, increased assessment literacy and development of professional and transferable skills. Key aspects to consider include:

• Establishing ground rules for peer assessment
• Training for the students on the use of the assessment criteria, including the use of these with examples of student work of different levels
• Supporting peer review through resources such as prompts in the form of questions to guide their thinking