Reflections on feedback – engaging students to feed forward

Feedback is hugely important in order for students to learn and advance academically (Price, Handley et al. 2010) as they can reflect on graded work using markers’ feedback and consider how to improve future work (Fry, Ketteridge et al. 2003). Without feedback, students may find it hard to improve upon past mistakes and therefore, not improve their grades. However, feedback is not a passive process and students must engage with the feedback, reflect on it to understand it and then consider how it can feed forward to improve future work. However, from personal observations students often continue to make the same mistakes, perhaps as they may not physically pick up written feedback (Winter and Dye 2004), they may not read or engage with it and subsequently do not act on it. Therefore, exercises that encourage students to engage with feedback should be beneficial to student learning and should foster good practice in the future. In this study students were asked to write a short (150 word max) reflection on previous feedback in some pieces of their in-course assessment, reflecting on how the feedback aided them in improving their work. Students were given guidance notes on what was expected in a reflection on their feedback. From this exercise the study aims to investigate if reflection leads to increased student engagement with feedback and if students find feedback to be more helpful after reflecting on it. Additionally, the study looks to investigate why students engage, or not with feedback, what they think the purpose of feedback is and how they think feedback could be improved. Answers to these questions will be collected via questionnaires to the students before and after they have written reflections on their feedback. The research hopes to increase student engagement with feedback fostering them to be responsible learners and promoting critical reflection