'What’s the use of being nice? Characteristics of feedback comments that students intend to use in improving their work' by David Playfoot, Ruth Horry and Aimee E Pink in (2024) Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education comments
Feedback is an integral part of the learning process for students (Hyland 2013). Providing feedback on student work is time-consuming for teaching staff (Gibbs and Simpson 2004) and a lot of effort is expended in trying to provide high-quality feedback (e.g. Pitt and Norton 2017; Brooks et al. 2021). In spite of this, students in the UK rate feedback as one of the aspects of their university experience with which they are the least satisfied on the National Student Survey (Bell and Brooks 2017). It should be noted that the fact that students are the least satisfied with this aspect of their course does not indicate that the majority of students are dissatisfied just that satisfaction scores are lower than for other areas. Similar patterns are also seen in the Course Experience Questionnaire used to gauge student satisfaction in Australia (Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching 2023). Research has also shown that students often do not act upon the feedback that they are given because they do not consider it to be useful (McGrath, Taylor, and Pychyl 2011). As a consequence, a key goal of research in recent years has been to examine what affects the likelihood that feedback comments are perceived positively by the students that receive them. The current paper outlines three studies which have attempted to determine the characteristics of comments that students believe that they would use to further develop their work.
The existing literature considers a variety of factors that may contribute to feedback being useful. There are already several excellent reviews and meta-analyses related to feedback practices (e.g. Wiliam 2018; Wisniewski, Zierer, and Hattie 2019; Van der Kleij and Lipnevich 2021; Winstone and Nash 2023). Despite this, there is still no clear consensus as to the characteristics of effective feedback – the effect sizes revealed by the meta-analyses are widely variable from paper to paper (Wiliam 2018). Part of the problem is likely to be that assessment and feedback practices are heavily constrained by the policies of the university in which a study is conducted, by the principles of assessment and programme design, and by individual differences between the students who receive the feedback (Price, Handley, and Millar 2011; Evans 2013; Ajjawi et al. 2022). This has led to claims that there can be no overarching ‘gold standard’ of feedback because the contextual factors are so influential (Krause-Jensen 2010). Nevertheless, we argue that there are likely to be underlying principles that apply to effective feedback; the implementation of these principles may be moderated by institutional influences or specific student populations, but they will provide a good foundation on which to build. In what follows, we outline the key characteristics of effective feedback identified in the literature and investigated in our own studies. To simplify our discussions, we will consider potential characteristics of feedback under umbrella categories, offering examples of the way that these categories have been operationalised in previous studies.
The first broad category can be referred to as ‘usability’ which subsumes feedback which is clear (Hattie and Timperley 2007; Ferguson 2011; Price, Handley, and Millar 2011; Li and De Luca 2012; Fong et al. 2018) and constructive (Lizzio and Wilson 2008; Dawson et al. 2019; Henderson et al. 2019). Ferguson’s (2011) study, for example, surveyed 566 students at an Australian university and reported that good feedback should be clear and unambiguous as well as having an explicit connection to the marking criteria for the assignment. Dawson et al. (2019) study identified that clarity and constructiveness (and indeed ‘usability’) were key themes among their 400 student participants. This is not surprising – for feedback to be effective, it must be acted upon (Boud and Molloy 2013); and in order to act upon it, the student must understand what they are supposed to do, and it must be actionable (Ryan et al. 2021). In a similar vein, adopting the Transparency in Learning and Teaching framework (TILT e.g. Winkelmes 2023) has been shown to result in improvements across a variety of metrics of the student experience. TILT aims to make communication between students and teachers clear, and can be applied to all aspects of teaching practice (see https://tilthighered.com/tiltexamplesandresources for examples). Transparency as to why students are undertaking tasks and how their work is to be graded, has been shown to improve student perceptions of assignments and feedback, as well as improving the quality of the work (Winkelmes et al. 2015).
Both clarity and constructiveness were therefore characteristics of effective feedback that we considered in the current study. In addition, we included ‘helpfulness’ in our examination of feedback. This was motivated by the fact that large-scale student satisfaction metrics used to rank universities in the UK (the National Student Survey) ask final-year undergraduates to indicate whether the feedback that they received during their courses was helpful. Helpfulness could be considered as conceptually similar to constructiveness or usability, but to our knowledge there is no empirical evidence to support or refute this interpretation as it pertains to student perceptions of assignment feedback. We sought to gain this evidence as part of the current study.
A second umbrella category of feedback characteristics can be referred to as ‘niceness’. A large body of research has identified that students prefer to receive feedback that is supportive (Xu and Carless 017; Carless and Winstone 2023), encouraging (Abramowitz, O’Leary, and Rosén 1987; Lizzio and Wilson 2008), motivating (Henderson et al. 2019) and has a positive tone (Winstone et al. 2016; Dawson et al. 2019). Tone, in this case, refers to whether the feedback is framed in a positive or a negative manner. Dawson et al. (2019) demonstrated that feedback that appears overly critical can demotivate students and is unlikely to be used, while Winstone et al. (2016) reported that positively framed feedback is more likely to be acted upon. All of these characteristics of feedback reflect the fact that receiving comments on assignments can have an emotional impact on students (Weaver 2006; Parker and Winstone 2016). Ultimately, students will be less likely to engage with feedback that makes them feel demotivated (Ball et al. 2009) and thus the feedback will not achieve the desired effect.
In the current work, we asked participants to rate real feedback comments (received by other students in previous academic years) for clarity, constructiveness, helpfulness, encouragement, supportiveness, motivational value and tone to explore the interrelation of these characteristics. Previous studies have considered these factors but not all at the same time and hence it is possible that they are not distinct. Understanding the interrelations between these perceptions might help to understand some of the inconsistencies of previous findings and meta-analyses. Further, as outlined briefly above, there are multiple factors that may influence the effectiveness of a feedback comment. In all cases, though, the effectiveness of a feedback comment is contingent on the recipient engaging with the feedback and acting upon it. For this reason, we asked our participants to rate their ‘intention to use’ each of the feedback comments, imagining that they had received them on their own work. Previous studies have examined student preferences relating to feedback or changes in attainment following feedback (Winstone and Nash 2023). We argue that what students prefer is important information for instructors, but that preference does not guarantee that feedback will foster improvement in future assignments (Jonsson 2013). For example, feedback which is effusive is likely to be well-received but will not be likely to include the necessary information to allow the student to capitalise on what they did well or to correct what they did not (Holmes and Papageorgiou 2009). Thus, knowing the characteristics of feedback comments which are likely to be acted upon is key.
