Active Feedback

This paper reports on the initial findings of a project which explores students’ perceptions of the effectiveness of a feedback intervention intended to enhance their engagement with hitherto problematic aspects of the Professional Enquiry and Decision-Making assignment, part of the MEd in Professional Practice. Five areas were selected as the focus for feedback improvements: literature search strategies, literature reviews, ethics applications, research dissemination strategies and identifying limitations in their research designs. The aim of the intervention was to develop the students’ abilities to generate useful feedback on their own work while still benefitting from more conventional support offered through peer and tutor feedback. The intervention sequence was as follows: In each of the five areas of focus: 1. students compared exemplars of high-quality work in the same topic domain in which they would subsequently produce their own work and identified what made these of high quality. The intention here was to appraise students of what was required by the task and what effective output would look like; 2. Students then produced their own work in that area of focus; 3. Students then compared their findings from (i) with their own work and generated their own feedback about how they could make improvements. Students wrote down what they learned from each comparison in a worksheet thereby making their self-generated feedback explicit. This both enhances students own’ feedback generation and gives teachers information about what feedback they need to provide. This study is interpreted in terms of new research (Nicol, 2021: Nicol and McCallum, 2021) which argues that if students are to learn to regulate their own learning and performance independently of their teachers, we must build their capacity to generate their own feedback. The implications for staff workload are also discussed