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Spotlight: How can you use feedback to help you to learn? Dr Robert Nash, Aston University and Dr Naomi Winstone, University of Surrey Why is the way people use feedback relevant to university students? We receive feedback from other people all the time in everyday life, and especially during university education. University students receive feedback when they receive their final grades, but also at many other stages as they progress through their studies. They might discuss their subject understanding with a lecturer, debate with a friend about the strengths of their writing style, or test themselves on topics that they really want to master, and receive feedback on their performance from all of these activities. Many experts say that feedback is the key to effective learning, and there is a lot of research evidence to support this claim. But unfortunately, many people see feedback as a one-way communication – as a judgment or piece of information that is passed on by an expert to a novice. In reality, this conception of feedback doesn’t work well, because even the very best advice is completely useless unless the person who receives the advice actually uses it. If someone tells you, for example, how to improve the critical evaluation in your writing, then this advice could lead you to perform much better next time. But if you don’t listen to the advice or you don’t reflect on it, the likelihood is that you won’t improve. Good feedback is a two-way process, and students have some responsibility for working with feedback to ensure it benefits them. What does your research involve? Our research looks at the psychological barriers that can sometimes prevent students from using the feedback they receive to improve their learning. We think of the giving and receiving of feedback as a type of communication, which psychology clearly has a lot to say about. For example, students might not understand the complex terminology that their lecturers use in feedback. They might not know what they are supposed to do with it, or might not feel equipped to take those steps. Or, they might lack the motivation to deal with advice that seems unfair or negative. Using mixed qualitative and quantitative methods, we try to understand the barriers and what students and tutors can do about them. We are also trying to understand some of the cognitive factors that determine how well students remember feedback. In our experiments, we discovered that minor differences in wording of feedback can have sizeable effects on the likelihood of a student subsequently remembering it. These kinds of findings, if they can be shown to exist outside of the psychology lab, could have important implications for improving feedback in education and other contexts. Are there any particular challenges involved in this research? One challenge is that it’s often difficult to gather evidence that is based on more than just people’s opinions – what students think about feedback, for example, or what lecturers think about students. We are both experimental psychologists by background, and so we look for solid, measurable evidence of what works and what does not work. It is useful to study people’s views and beliefs, of course, but we’re always excited when we find research that examines how people’s behaviour changes following an intervention of some kind. Another challenge is that all of these issues operate within a complex political and economic context, which can make it all the more difficult to find satisfactory solutions. Students often pay high fees for their university education, and many believe that this means their lecturers should take responsibility for ensuring that feedback is effective. However, many lecturers say that their increasing class sizes and spiralling workload—often also a result of economic pressures—prevent them from giving more personalised feedback. The barriers caused by these kinds of political and economic factors are difficult for us, as psychologists, to tackle, even though doing so is clearly

© Oxford University Press, 2020