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very important. Finding ways to promote dialogue is vital, so that students and tutors can understand each other’s perspectives.

Tell me how you have applied your research to make a difference to students’ learning Based on our research, we have conducted workshops with undergraduate students, and with academics and learning support staff, at numerous universities and colleges. The student workshops have been designed to help students to understand the power they have to seek and use feedback more proactively and, in turn, to help them learn more effectively. Students have engaged in thinking about the kinds of activities that they can do without having to rely on receiving formal feedback on their work long after they’ve submitted it. The staff workshops help staff to understand the reasons why students don’t always make use of the advice that they give, and to think about how to tackle some of those reasons directly. We have evaluated our workshops, and found that thinking about how feedback is used, and why it is sometimes not used, can be extremely valuable for everyone, and can help students to develop important skills that are transferrable to the workplace and beyond. What advice would you give to students, based on your research? We suggest that you reflect on what you can do to take control of the feedback process, rather than being dependent on your tutors’ judgments. Reflect on the things that you can actively do to gather more feedback and to use it effectively. You could ask friends for peer feedback, develop action plans based on your past feedback, or you could keep a portfolio of all the feedback you receive so that you can spot patterns and trends over time. But before it’s possible to do most of these things, it’s also important to first recognise a much bigger problem: that is, nobody likes the prospect of receiving criticism from other people. Because of this problem, when we receive feedback we often put up lots of defences to stop us from having to hear it, or accept it. If we can be aware of the defences we are putting up, we can be more conscious of how they might be preventing us from improving. That’s difficult, but well worth trying! Find out more… Winstone, N. E., Nash, R. A., Parker, M., & Rowntree, J. (2017). Supporting learners’ agentic engagement with feedback: A systematic review and a taxonomy of recipience processes. Educational Psychologist, 52 , 17-37. Cognitive theories of learning Behaviourist studies of learning allow us to measure observable changes in behaviour as a result of learning, but were criticised because they did not allow psychologists to draw any inferences about how learning happened in the mind. Cognitive psychologists are interested in thinking; what happens in the mind between the stimulus and the response? You might find it interesting to read educational psychologist Thomas Shuell’s (1986) paper, which presents an historical account of early cognitive psychological perspectives on learning, and explains more about why it is important to investigate how we process information through cognition when we learn. Learning and memory As we have seen from our brief exploration of behaviourist theories, learning can be defined as a process that brings about a change of behaviour. In contrast, memory relates to changes to the brain, and the storage of information within it. Memory is an important component of learning, since we cannot learn without remembering, whereas learning incorporates an additional component relating to an observable change in behaviour as a result of what is remembered.

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