Fast-track Feedback

Fast-Track Feedback is a two-stage enhancement activity (student workshop and staff debrief) which provides rapid insights into students’ engagement with feedback on programmes, as well as practical approaches to improve experiences of feedback processes.

A group of students participating in a Fast-Track Feedback workshop.

If you want to: 

⪢ Understand what aspects of feedback create most engagement from students 

⪢ Gain insight into some of the barriers to student feedback engagement  

⪢ Illustrate what is already working well on the programme 

⪢ Provide a spark for discussion amongst your programme team 

... then Fast-track Feedback is for you. 

Contact someone from the team.

 

Find out more about the project so far 

The Curriculum Enhancement Programme team worked closely with Bristol SU to design and run student workshops with both UG and PGT programmes, focusing on improving students’ engagement with feedback (and their experiences) with a view to questions such as ‘how often does feedback help you to improve your work?’. 

Hour-long workshops were run with 15 programmes and student satisfaction for these was 98% ‘excellent’ or ‘good’, with debrief sessions provided for programme teams.  

  • Experiences of feedback are often emotive for students 
  • There is a recognition of the (potential) utility value of feedback aligned to formative and summative assessment, and subsequent expectations around this 
  • Planning and designing feedback activities is necessary to improving students’ engagement and appreciation of feedback 

Ways of improving student engagement with feedback 

Findings 

Recommendations/Actions 

Build students’ recognition that space and time are needed for feedback 

  
  • Students benefit through developing dialogue around feedback with staff by attending optional sessions e.g. feedback cafes/office hours 
  • Students benefit from opportunities to engage informally with students from other year groups 

Develop students’ proactivity in feedback 

  
  • Students benefit by engaging more with formative assessments and feedback from those 
  • Students benefit from reflecting on their own feedback and plan how to improve for next assessment 
  • Students benefit from being more proactive at contacting staff with queries about their feedback  

Provide structure and scaffold for peer learning 
  • Students benefit from opportunities to summarise feedback across different units 
  • Students benefit through regularising peer assessment and internalising standards 

Ways of improving institutional approaches to feedback 

Findings 

Recommendations/Actions 

Plan and evaluate scheduling of feedback  
  • Have specific signposted sessions for feedback to be discussed 
  • Prioritise detailed feedback during a unit rather than at the end after a summative task. 
  • Open up feedback on MCQs/exam scripts and deconstruct features of these 

Consider the specificity of feedback 

 
  • Use in-text annotations and screencast to help explain feedback  
  • Aim to include some feedback which is actionable  
  • Review language of Turnitin rubric 

Provide modelling of feedforward 
  • Provide specific and detailed rather than generic feedback; focus especially on what skill a student should focus on to move up to the next grade boundary (e.g. 2:1 to First) 
  • Make feedback more interactive (in-person discussions) and/or visual (screencasts)  
  • Provide example answers with feedback and record the exemplification sessions. 

Feedback survey summary

  • Students do perceive value in feedback and feel they internalise their feedback 
  • Students are less active in deploying their feedback 
  • Feedback is not always taken further in the form of dialogue, self-evaluation or seen as developmental 

Different feedback approaches were presented in the workshops and students were asked to evaluate which would be most effective for improving their experience of how often feedback would help them to improve their work. 

  1. We (as students) could complete more practice tasks in each unit, with great peer feedback, which are linked to final graded assessments. 
  2. Staff could use in-text comments to help us see exactly where we need to address the issues raised in the feedback summary.
  3. We (as students) could create opportunities (formal or informal) to discuss our work with senior peers​
  4. Staff could give audio/screencast feedback on an extract from an assessment in a five-minute recording (instead of written comments).  

Find out more about how Fast-Track Feedback is designed

We will run a 1 hour workshop with a group of students, in which we work together to reflect on the ways of engaging with feedback on the programme, explain what is working well, and suggest places where they think change would be useful. We will then discuss the outcomes with teaching staff at a separate debrief session that takes about an hour. 

This is up to programme directors. Some workshops have been run with a mixture of student participants from different years, some have been final year students, and some have been first and second year students. Student workshops have typically had between 3-12 participants, although we have also facilitated workshops with 30 students. 

The programme director, unit leads, the student administration manager or representative and as many staff who teach on or administer the programme as you can manage! 

We will present an analysis of the feedback and comments provided by the students, support discussion, and suggest proven tactics to help address any issues identified. The debrief sessions often spark wide-ranging discussions about feedback (and assessment design) on the programme and its organisation, and the more people that attend the session the wider and richer the discussion will be. 

Quick fixes that might improve student experience in-year; ideas for larger changes that could be brought in next year; confirmation (or otherwise!) that planned changes are likely to be well-received; food-for-thought for longer-term programme review plans. 

Fast-Track Feedback can work well as a stand-alone activity, but often the experience prompt teams to consider delving deeper into their assessment and feedback approaches via TESTA, or a bespoke workshop to address a particular aspect of practice.