Understanding Assessment Feedback

Using the tabs on the left of the screen you can find out lots of useful information and examples of how to understand and use your assessment feedback to help you improve your performance.

 

However, if you're short on time, we have created this short video as a quick guide. The video is interactive so please click on any of the links for more information along the way.

Video Transcript – understanding and using your feedback effective (duration 3 minutes 52 seconds)

The purpose of feedback is to help you improve.

Assessment feedback can sometimes feel like a personal critique, and even when the feedback is positive, there's a tendency to focus our attention on the negatives.

This quick video will help you to understand your feedback so that you can learn from it and use it in future assessments.

Whilst studying you will receive lots of different types of feedback, such as in lectures and seminar, from tutors and peers. The three most important types of feedback that you’re likely to use to improve come from formative assessment feedback, summative assessment feedback and peer feedback.

Click on each one to find out more

Feedback on most written formative and summative assessments will usually be given to you in one of three way. Either it will be give to you as annotations within the work that you submitted, or it might be posted on your module ELE page. Finally, it might be given via Turnitin and you can access it using the little pencil toggle or in the rubric.

For other types of assessment, such as exams or oral presentations, feedback might be given differently but your tutor will always make this clear in lectures or via ELE

It’s important to remember that feedback is your friend. Try to focus on the feedback rather than the grade, this will help you understand what you did well and what areas you need to focus on to improve in the future.

It can be useful to think about feedback like a mini action plan.

Here are some of our top tips for making your feedback work for you

We can sometimes react emotionally to feedback so it’s important to not make hasty judgements too quickly.

Feedback can often make more sense and feel less intimidating when you’ve have some time to reflect

So read you feedback but then return to it a few days later when you feel ready

When you ready, make sure you pay as much attention to the praise in your feedback that you give to areas for improvement.

Make a note of these strengths so that you can keep dong them in future work

The language in feedback can be overwhelming or confusing sometimes.

If something in your feedback isn’t clear, speak with your tutor through office hours or use the resources available in this guide to help you understand it.

You won’t be able to take the action needed to improve if you don’t understand what your feedback means so it’s really important to ask questions and seek support when needed

Don’t ignore your feedback, act upon it.

Use a feedback log to keep your feedback in one place where you can reflect on it and decide what action you need to take.

You could do this using a table, journal, an excel spreadsheet or a simple word document

We recommend that in your feedback log you

Include the assessment details

Record the good things you did

List the areas highlighted for improvement

Make a list of actions you will take to improve that area for next time, for example, you might decide to attend one of our workshops

So remember

When using your feedback to improve your work, pay attention to the positives and the negatives.

Keep your feedback in one place using a feedback log or journal so that you can check whether your skills are improving.

Look through the rest of this guide for more helpful tips.

Good luck with using your feedback to improve your grade.