What does good feedback look like – and, perhaps more importantly, what does it take for students to actually use it?
This was the question colleagues from the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences explored during a three-hour workshop this July. Hosted by Claire Hudson, Alex Conibear, Bex Pike and Scott Abbott Paterson from the HALSEN Assessment & Feedback Special Interest Group, this session brought colleagues together to share ideas, practical approaches and experiences around two key questions:
- How do we improve feedback quality and consistency?
- How do we improve student engagement with feedback?
Starting with the bigger picture
Associate Professor Dawn Davies, HLS Academic Director (Programmes, Curriculum and Assessment) opened the workshop by sharing the faculty’s strategic objective to increase the usefulness of feedback for students and nurture a sense of ownership.
Dawn emphasised the importance managing expectations of both students and staff. She also reminded us of the work of Nicol & Macfarlane-Dick who argue that the purpose of feedback in higher education is not simply to help students identify the gap between their current and desired performance. Feedback should also support the development of self-regulated learning, enabling students to use what they learn from feedback to improve their future work.
This idea — feedback as something students use, rather than simply something they receive — provided an important thread running throughout the workshop.
Sharing what works
The workshop featured eight short flash-talks, showcasing a wide range of approaches to improving feedback quality, consistency and engagement.
Professor Sheila Amici-Dargan (School of Biological Sciences), Joe Gould (BILT) and Tarik Rahman (Feedback Engagement Fellow) shared their experience of the Feedback Engagement Fellow project Thirty 30 student fellows worked with students and staff to develop activities and resources to enhance feedback, with an example from the Business School.
Other flash-talks demonstrated and evaluated practical tools for delivering high-quality and consistent feedback, including Turnitin QuickMarks, the use of marking criteria wording, and approaches to enhancing peer feedback through FeedbackFruits.
There were also inspiring examples of initiatives designed to improve feedback literacy and engagement, including the Feedback Café and The Feedback Engagement Tool.
Giles Cory introduced proposed simplified marking criteria, designed to be more accessible to students and align with OfS outcomes. The new interactive tool can be embedded on Blackboard, and allows educators to define complex terminology and clearly explain how each criterion can be demonstrated within a specific assessment
Jules Pope, alongside the BVSc final-year leads, shared their experience of effective feedback conversations. This theme was echoed across several of the talks, including Liz Arnold’s presentation on techniques for training external partners to deliver effective feedback.
After the flash-talks — and a coffee break to refuel — colleagues moved into vibrant round-table discussions to explore the two workshop questions in more depth.
How do we improve feedback quality and consistency?
Discussions highlighted the importance of feedback that is clear, personalised, actionable and explicitly linked to marking criteria. Participants stressed that students need to understand not only how they performed, but also what they can do differently to improve their future work.
A major challenge identified was inconsistency between markers, units and programmes, particularly where marking criteria are interpreted differently.
So, what could help?
Suggestions included:
- marker calibration meetings
- shared Turnitin QuickMarks and comment banks
- simplified marking guidance
- peer review of feedback
- marking demonstration videos
- consistent feedback structures moderated by experienced colleagues
Participants also highlighted the value of feedback conversations, Feedback Cafés and assessment landscapes that help students understand how feedback from one assessment can be applied to future assessments.
Importantly, there was broad agreement that consistency should not come at the expense of meaningful, individualised feedback. Instead, tools and shared practices should support staff to deliver high-quality, efficient and coherent feedback across teams.
How do we improve student engagement with feedback?
The second discussion turned to perhaps the more challenging question: how do we encourage students to engage with feedback and use it to improve?
Participants agreed that this requires two things: developing students’ feedback literacy and creating structured opportunities for them to act on feedback.
A range of barriers were identified, including emotional reactions to feedback, uncertainty about where to access feedback, lack of confidence, competing workload pressures, and perceptions that feedback has limited value beyond the original task.
The approaches discussed focused on making engagement with feedback a more visible and structured part of learning. These included embedding feedback discussions within personal tutoring, using Feedback Cafés and providing scaffolded reflection activities that encourage students to apply previous feedback to subsequent assessments.
Colleagues shared a variety of approaches already being used. Some were building reflection activities into classes, others were using feedback logs, while many were using coversheets to capture both feedback and feedforward requests.
There was strong support for strengthening feedforward by making explicit connections between feedback from one assessment and expectations for future assignments. Assessment landscapes were highlighted as one useful way of making these connections visible to students.
Participants also discussed ways of monitoring engagement with feedback, including using Blackboard and Turnitin analytics, observing longitudinal improvements and incorporating reflective activities into coursework.
From feedback to ongoing dialogue
Across the discussions, one message came through particularly strongly: effective feedback is about much more than the comments written on an assessment.
Our conversations echoed Dawn’s opening message and emphasised the importance of shifting feedback from a one-way transmission of comments to an ongoing dialogue.
When feedback is clear, meaningful and connected to future learning — and when students are given the time, tools and confidence to act on it — it can become much more than an explanation of past performance. It can support reflection, resilience, self-efficacy and continuous learning.
The workshop showed that there is already a wealth of innovative practice across Health and Life Sciences. The challenge — and opportunity — is to continue sharing these approaches, developing common practices where they are helpful, and creating more opportunities for students to take ownership of their feedback and use it to shape what they do next.
You can find the slides and resources from the workshop in the HALSEN repository.
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