Considerations in transforming feedback practice

As we suggest above, there are many things to consider when thinking about transforming feedback practice for your course(s). To start with, what are you trying to achieve? Maybe you want to engage your students more with your subject and in their learning, perhaps you are aware that your students’ approach to an assessment task is not what you had expected and you want to be clearer, maybe you want to know what feedback your students feel would be useful to them? These are all good reasons to transform feedback practice, and there are many more too.

As with assessment, the next things to consider are around your course and your students. These include thinking about the context in which the learning and teaching take place, your students’ expectations of feedback, and what year grouping they are and therefore how much support they need to develop at University. You might expect final year students to be more confident than first year students, but this might not necessarily be so, and you will only know by asking. You also need to be aware of the assessment methods you and others, use, and therefore what types of feedback, and what emphasis with that feedback your students might need or want. You will need to be cognisant of the resources available to you and finally, and perhaps most importantly, you need to be clear that the feedback practice(s) you choose really will support your students to improve their performance.