By Yuting Huo and Kateryna Hrynchuk, Feedback Engagement Fellows 2025–26
[In the first of this two-part blog, Yuting Huo and Kateryna Hrynchuk share their experiences and insights into running feedback engagement activities]
Our role as Feedback Engagement Fellows sits within a broader university initiative, supported by BILT and Bristol SU, whose overarching aim is to improve the experience of feedback for both students and staff. The project is grounded in a clear principle: feedback is not a product to be received after an assessment. It is a process of engagement, and that engagement is itself a form of critical reflection, a skill that can be developed and coached. That framing shaped everything we built.
Our core mission has been to bridge the gap between marker comments and student progress, focusing specifically on the needs of Business School and SPIS students. What we did not anticipate when we took on the role was how much the project would teach us, not just about feedback systems, but about students, about marking, and about ourselves as learners.
Before designing anything, we attended the FEF induction in November 2025, where we were introduced to the concept of Feedbacktivity: a framework mapping student engagement with feedback across two axes, from negative to positive experience, and from passive to proactive behaviour. The students we most needed to reach sat in the lower half of that grid, dissatisfied with feedback and not yet doing anything about it. Previous FEFs had run skills and feedback pop-up events, BSP workshops connecting assessment feedback to employability, and peer marking activities where students applied marking criteria to anonymised work. We used those models as a foundation and built on them.
Finding the Pain Points: Insights from the “Flash Mobs”
To understand the real barriers students face, we designed a Checklist and held two Flash Mob events on campus. We spoke with Business School students to identify what stops them from using feedback effectively.
The results were clear. We identified the Top 5 core issues:
- Feedback is too vague (33 votes): Comments like “needs more analysis” are hard to interpret.
2. Wanting clearer guidance on high-quality writing (23 votes): Abstract criteria can be difficult to visualize without examples.
3. Preferring earlier feedback (22 votes): Feedback sometimes arrives too late to inform the next assignment.
4. Too general to act on (21 votes): Students understand the problem but don’t know the specific steps to fix it.
5. Needing support interpreting feedback (20 votes): Developing “feedback literacy” to decode academic shorthand takes time.
What those five issues had in common was not simply that students found feedback unhelpful. It was that the gap between receiving a comment and knowing what to do next had never been bridged for them. Bristol’s approach to feedback activity is designed to be precise, actionable, and supportive. What we found in the Flash Mobs was that students were often experiencing none of those three things in practice, even when the written comments were technically adequate. That is the gap we set out to close.
Our first conversation was with Wayne Holland, Professor and Director of Education at the Business School. He was the one who pointed us toward Lloyd Fletcher, Associate Professor in Management, because we needed a qualitative piece of work, a report or essay type assessment, that we could use as a real example in the workshop. Wayne helped us understand what actually separates bands in that kind of writing, which shaped everything we built around the 65 to 75 question. Lloyd then filmed a short tutorial after the workshop itself, comparing a 60-band and a 70-band samples, giving students something concrete to watch and analyse rather than an abstract explanation of criteria. Joe Gould, Senior Research Associate at BILT, was our mentor throughout the whole project: present at every stage, helping us think through the design, the framing, and what we were learning as we went. His guidance on the DEFT framework and on how the university thinks about feedback engagement kept the work grounded in something larger than a single session.
In the next blog post, find out more about what happened in the workshop and Yuting and Kateryna’s reflections on the experience overall.
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