Providing Feedback

Effective Formative Feedback

These pages are aimed at both staff and students. The staff page contains information on how to write effective formative feedback for students. The student page contains information and video resources on how staff develop aligned feedback and how to use formative feedback to improve grades.

The purpose of formative feedback is to improve the student's performance, not to justify the summative feedback (grades). However, much feedback is not even read by the student, let alone applied to improve future performance. This means a lot of wasted effort on the part of markers who often spend a great deal of precious time writing comments for students, not to mention students' lost opportunity for improvement. The aim is to assist markers in providing efficient and worthwhile formative feedback that has a maximal chance of leading to improved learning outcomes because students can and will apply it to their work.