5 tips to boost students’ feedback literacy

You put a lot of time into giving feedback and your students could learn a lot from it to improve their work. Only, the latter often turns out to be easier said than done. Students do not always take such an active role in the feedback process. Possibly, your students’ feedback literacy is still lacking. How can you change this? Here are 5 tips to boost feedback literacy.

Feedback literacy means that students are able to read, interpret and effectively use feedback to improve their work. In this article, we already talked about the concept of feedback literacy. Today, we want to give you practical tools to boost your students’ feedback literacy.

1. Teach your students to handle emotion

It is normal for feedback to evoke different emotions. So promoting feedback literacy is also about learning to deal with feedback and its accompanying emotions. Talk about it with your students. That way, they know what to expect and that it is normal to experience certain feelings. This will help them be more open to feedback and less likely to react defensively.

2. Let your students ask for feedback themselves

A good way to develop feedback literacy is to let students formulate their own feedback questions. When students ask questions about their own work, they are more open to receiving feedback compared to unsolicited feedback. They also receive more targeted feedback that meets their needs which contributes to a positive experience. Moreover, asking a good feedback question encourages students to think actively about the quality of their own work. This will help them generate valuable feedback themselves.

3. Have your students practise giving and receiving feedback

We usually think of feedback as information from the teacher, but peer feedback can be just as instructive. A peer assessment is a good way to let students take an active role in the feedback process. Giving peer feedback ensures that students learn to formulate good feedback. Furthermore, a peer assessment makes students assess the quality of peers’ work, which makes them think about the quality of their own work. Afterwards, they can use the peer feedback they received to work on improving their own work. Moreover, when they receive feedback from several peers, they get a good idea of what is good feedback and what is not.

4. Let your students actively process feedback

Students will have to use the feedback received in follow-up work to ensure that the feedback is actually effective. Why else was all the feedback given? But even when students receive good feedback, they do not always use it. There can be several reasons for this: they do not understand the feedback, they do not want to use it, or they have no overview.

Using feedback requires processing. By actively processing feedback, students can more easily take the next step towards a new version of their work. A feedback action plan can be helpful here. In an action plan, students can e.g. organise feedback by theme, indicate whether they agree/disagree with the feedback and why, formulate questions about unclear feedback, and note follow-up steps. In this way, students learn to handle feedback critically. Moreover, as a teacher you have a better view of what goes well and what students are struggling with.

5. Use Comproved to boost your students’ feedback literacy

Several features are built into the Comproved comparing tool to help promote student feedback literacy. For example, when setting up an assessment, you can indicate that you want your students to ask their own feedback question when handing in their work. You can also use the tool to easily organise peer assessments in which students assess each other’s work (anonymously) and provide feedback. After the (peer) assessment, you can have your students create an action plan in Comproved using the feedback received.

Interested in getting started with the comparing tool yourself? Read more about it here or contact us and we will be happy to help you get started!