Biosciences Takeover Week: Helping students feed forward for future success

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 By Louise Robson

The importance of feedback

Feedback is a critically important part of the student experience, allowing students to see what they are doing well, and where improvements are needed.  By applying feedback from earlier work, they are able to develop knowledge and skills for success in their studies, and importantly feedback also prepares them for future success after graduation. We know that we provide lots of different opportunities for feedback, but, interestingly, this is not reflected in the feedback question in the National Student Survey (NSS).  In the 2024 NSS survey, TUoS achieved 73% positivity in the question “How often does feedback help you improve your work”.  While this placed TUoS at the top of the Russell group for the overall assessment and feedback theme, we were placed ~50% across the whole sector.  For both TUoS and the HE sector, the feedback question is consistently one of the lowest in terms of positivity.  Clearly students are receiving feedback, so this begs the question, why are they not recognising that the feedback we give them helps them improve their work?

A cartoon drawing of two figures holding up cards, one with a thumbs up sign, the other has a thumbs down sign.


What do students think?

This apparent lack of student awareness of the feedback they receive led me to ask undergraduate students based in the School of Biosciences about feedback mechanisms and what they do with the feedback they receive.  My aim was to identify areas where we could improve the feedback experience, or how we communicate the feedback we provide, recognising that a better feedback experience might not be about changing the feedback itself. 118 students across the different bioscience programmes completed a survey about feedback.  The study generated a large amount of data (if you want to find out more you can access a summary of the findings), but there were some key findings around student use of feedback that I want to share here:

  1. When students get their grade and feedback, the first thing they do is look at their grade (94% of respondees) and then their feedback (82%).  This of course is not unexpected. 
  2. 25% of students store their feedback (so that they can refer back to it) as one of the first things they do.  The largest cohort (45% of students) often or sometimes do this, 21% hardly ever store their feedback and 9% never do so.
  3. Very few students complete an action plan to improve work in the same module or different modules. 68% and 70% hardly ever or never take this step, in the same or different modules, respectively.  This means students are not feeding forward, i.e. seeing the feedback we give them as a way to improve across their studies. 
  4. While 76% of students agreed that they knew what to do with their feedback, 85% said they would appreciate more guidance, figure 1. 

Strategies and top tips
So what strategies might be useful in terms of changing how students use the feedback we give them?  The first thing is to ensure students can see clear links across their assessments within and across the different academic years of their programme, i.e. vertical (programme level) mapping of assessments.  An example of this would be students completing a laboratory report in first year, and using the feedback from this to enhance a laboratory report in subsequent years, or feedback on an essay in one module informing an essay in a different module.  The second thing is to embed reflection on feedback into your assessments, e.g. have a formative cover sheet where students explain how they have acted on previous feedback in the current assessment.  Markers can then review the actions taken by students, and whether those actions have addressed the feedback (and if not provide additional feedback and strategies for improvement).  When I used this approach previously the majority of students submitted the reflection sheet (even though it wasn’t part of their summative assessment), and we saw an improvement in the programme NSS assessment and feedback theme. 

Overall, enhancing the student experience of feedback isn’t necessarily about changing what we do in terms of feedback, it is also about how we support students to use their feedback to feed forward.  This is an important skill, not just for their studies, but also for success after graduation.  

A bar chart graph which shows how many students know what to do in the feedback process. Red graph, black text, white background. 85% of students agree that they know what to do with their feedback. 100% of students would appreciate more guidance.



Figure 1:  Number of students who agree or disagree that they know what to do with their feedback (left) and would appreciate more guidance (right).

Professor Louise Robson is Professor of Digital Innovation in Learning & Teaching at the School of Biosciences