Towards more sustainable feedback to students

Abstract

Anyone engaged in a demanding activity, however experienced they are, can from time to time benefit from constructive and well-targeted feedback – the counsellor advising needy clients, the coordinator of a large and interprofessional team of colleagues, the help desk manager who constantly has to prioritise enquiries and requests for assistance. In such situations, periodic feedback can help individuals take stock of how well they are doing, and consider ways in which, for example, their effectiveness might be increased, their workload made more manageable, or their job satisfaction heightened. But when the activity concerned is not a wholly familiar one but involves significant new learning, as in educational settings, the role of feedback is particularly powerful. Indeed, in higher education, which is our focus here, well-crafted feedback can enhance learning in three significant ways: • by accelerating learning, i.e., speeding up what can be learned by the students concerned within a given period of time, and so enabling learning to take place more rapidly, or in greater depth or scope, than would otherwise be the case; • by optimising the quality of what is learned, i.e., helping to ensure that the learning outcomes achieved and evinced by the students meet the standards hoped for or required (e.g., in terms of precision, appreciation of complexity, applicability to real-world problems and so on); • by raising individual and collective attainment, through enabling the students to attain standards or levels of achievement higher than those which they might otherwise have reached, i.e., without recourse to the scaffolding afforded by feedback.