Closing the feedback loop: Ensuring effective action from student feedback

Abstract

Feedback from students can inform improvement in higher education institutions and be part of the students’ role in university management. To be effective it is important to ‘close the loop’: from student views, through identifying issues and delegating responsibility for action, to informing students of the action resulting from their expressed views. The focus of this paper is the Student Satisfaction Approach, an institution‐wide survey used internationally. The paper explores the different ways universities feed back information to students following institution‐wide surveys, including the different presentation styles and the types of issues that are presented to students, drawing on international examples.