‘Feed‐forward’: improving students' use of tutors' comments

Abstract

A small‐scale action research project was carried out on students' feedback histories on one undergraduate module. Old grades and comment sheets were collected and analysed by staff for recurring advice to individual students on the target module. This advice was then synthesized to create simple individual learning plans for the students' forthcoming assignments, in other words old feedback was applied to a new task. A number of additional teaching and learning interventions were provided for participants and the statistical outcomes showed a small gain in the grades achieved against those who did not participate. Interviews were held with participants that indicated a number of reasons why feedback was not optimized to assist further learning.