Jennifer Rose

Purpose

Students often do not engage in feedback because it is received too late to be of use to them (Hattie & Timperley 2006). Active feedback (Nicol 2021) is a structured process to empower students to write feedback for themselves so that they engage with it immediately and become independent connected learners.

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Methodology

To put this into practice first-year undergraduate students were asked to submit a formative essay online in the 6th week of their course. Of the 660 students on the course, 560 submitted essays and they were given access to view 10 randomly allocated peer’s essays. They used their innate comparative judgement to write answers to a series of reflective questions comparing the peer work they could view to their own essay generating active feedback for themselves.

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Findings

Students reported an overall increase of satisfaction with feedback, increased grades, and feelings of confidence. Over 88% of students reported that they felt positive about the assignment and process of writing their own feedback, with one student noting “I feel like I could have taken a little bit from all of the essays I read and therefore make my essay even stronger.”

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Originality

Active feedback is a new way of thinking about feedback. It empowers students to use comparative judgment to generate their own useful and active feedback at precisely the point they to engage with it. This makes their learning student led and reduces reliance on teachers thus creating independent connected learners.