Challenges to quality feedback

Feedback for learning is essential but not always straight forward or easy in its implementation.

Communication and affect

Being able to hear and extract meaningful information from feedback on our ideas, performance and understanding is a key professional skill in any career. But being open to criticism and able to manage our emotions is a learnt skill that we develop through practice and experience. For students who are in the process of developing their resilience, emotions can impact on their ability to hear and understand feedback. While student emotions are outside our control there are some approaches you can take to help students both in the moment of receiving feedback and developing their resilience:

• Compliment sandwiches where critical feedback is framed along with positive comments can help students to hear the feedback and see that the efforts they have made are recognised. 
• Creating opportunities for students to practice receiving feedback regularly will help build their resilience and ability to seek out useful and actionable feedback.
• Be clear about how they can put the feedback to use in future tasks. Encouraging students to look ahead to what they can do to improve their result next time can help them to think through feedback in a different light. 

Short on time

Giving personalised feedback to each and every student is a time consuming process. When students ask for more feedback it can seem like this is simply not possible given the limited time allocated to teaching and marking assessments. However the following approaches can assist to create more opportunities for students to receive feedback and speed up the process of providing feedback. 

• Are there particular issues or themes common to students’ work in the subject? It may be worthwhile presenting feedback to the whole class on these issues so that they can be explored in greater depth than time would allow on a per student basis. 
• Audio and video feedback can actually speed up the process of providing feedback, find out more about on the Audio and video feedback page of this collection. 
• Designing opportunities for peer feedback has many advantages and requires much less time from teaching staff than individualised teacher to student feedback. Find out more on the Peer feedback page of this collection.
• Providing materials to students that enable them to self-assess their work as they progress is a form of feedback that is time efficient and likely reusable each session. Find out more about self-assessment strategies here. 

Feedback consistency 

Assessing work can be a highly subjective experience, with the potential to be as emotionally challenging as the students’ experience of the absorbing feedback. While marking meetings are relatively common as a means to achieve consistency in grading across a teaching team, discussion of consistency and expectations around feedback given is less common. 

A well designed rubric can be a helpful tool to focus and direct consistent feedback to the components and aspects of the assessment most commonly relevant. Similarly comment banks and other tools such as exemplars can be shared within a subject team to assist teaching staff to be confident in delineating particular issues for targeted feedback. Both rubrics and exemplars are covered in more detail in the self assessment page of this collection. 

Beyond mark justification

Mark justification where students are provided an explanation of why they have gained their specific mark (and not a higher one) is an important aspect of feedback in the context of a formal assessment. However this becomes an issue when mark justification becomes the main or sole focus rather than being balanced with information designed to help the student achieve better in the next opportunity. 

The concern that some students will contest grades is likely the primary driver for a focus upon mark justification. Those providing assessment feedback may focus upon mark justification as a blanket preemptive defense, cutting short any debate by attempting to clearly lay out an argument for the mark given. Consequently the time available is spent on this task and not feed-forward and other growth focused comments. This creates a response that is larger than the problem itself – ie, while potentially only a few students would contest their grades, all students receive defense focused feedback in order to mitigate this.

The following approaches can assist in keeping feedback to students focussed on useful and actionable information:

• As a subject teaching team discuss this issue and assure teaching staff that if a student does contest marks this is not seen as a failure in their approach to teaching.
• Consider developing an assignment feed forward guide for the subject that specifies the key aspects of an assignment that teaching staff should comment on leading into the next assignment/ future work.
• Another way of framing feedback is to tell students what they could do next time to get the higher mark. For students focused on marks this shifts their attention to what they can do better rather than focusing upon the mark they have already received and may not be happy with. 
• Create a short standard passage that you can give to students explaining what the focus of feedback will be. If you are a course coordinator, consider sharing this with your teaching team or embedding it into how you frame the expectations around the assignment.
• Consider using video or audio feedback, if students can hear from your voice and expression that you empathise with them and are not attacking them this may lessen the chance that they will contest the grade. Read more about this in the Audio and Video Feedback page in this collection.