This guest post is by Dr. Sara van Goozen, lecturer at the University of York’s Department of Politics and International Relations. As well as teaching and researching political theory, Sara has pursued research on inclusive assessment and feedback practices, and is one of the founding members of the Teaching Political Theory Network.
If you use Turnitin to provide feedback on student work, the image on the right may be sadly familiar to you: it shows which students have viewed the feedback they received. In this case, it’s a random sample of essays submitted by first-year students in January 2025. The screenshot was taken around 6 months after the release of the mark and shows that in the given sample, only about 50% of students viewed their feedback.
Although it’s fairly widely accepted that good quality feedback is important for student learning, writing good feedback is only part of the work: students also need to engage with the feedback they receive (not just give it a cursory glance!). And ideally, they need to engage with it over a period of time. However, there’s a good amount of research on the various factors which affect a student’s ability to benefit from feedback: on the teacher’s side, feedback may be vague, unhelpful, alienating, too detailed or not detailed enough. On the student’s side, they may not fully appreciate the importance of engaging with feedback, they may not recognize the information they receive as feedback, or they may find it difficult to extract lessons (and act on them) from the feedback they receive.
As colleagues from across two faculties at the University of York (Yaprak Tavman, Liz Hurrell, Jeremy Moulton and me), we decided to look into the barriers facing our students when using/engaging with feedback. Our research was funded by the EDI Research Centre at the University of York, and we had a couple of overlapping aims: to get a better understanding of the barriers facing students, what we can do to reduce those barriers, and what it is that students themselves can do – perhaps with our guidance – to make it easier to engage with feedback (and hopefully improve their results long-term. Our research was conducted together with student partners from the three Departments (Politics/PPE, Economics, Geography), who helped develop both staff- and student guidelines.
Our guidelines were based on seven focus groups (with a total of 30 students), which aimed at understanding how students from diverse backgrounds engage with feedback and what barriers to engagement they had encountered. We then provided our student partners with summaries of the focus groups, and they went away and came up with some preliminary recommendations for students. Over the next couple of weeks, we finetuned them, and also started developing staff guidelines.
The initial phase of the research is now complete, but there is a lot more to do – including, hopefully, studying the effect of implementing our guidelines. For now, however, I can share a couple of initial findings and, crucially, a snapshot of the guidelines for staff and for students we developed. More can be found on the University of York EDI Research Centre website.
Key findings
There were some remarkable consistencies among the three departments. Most students had some story about feedback being too vague, too generic, or lacking clear recommendations (feedforward). They noted that feedback often focused too much on problems/areas for improvement, rather than what was good.
They also indicated a number of barriers to accessing/engaging with feedback. Some students were unaware that they could talk to lecturers about their feedback or that they could use office hours to get clarification on feedback. Other students were aware that this was possible, but said they were hesitant to make use of office hours because they were unsure what to talk about or because they wanted to avoid taking up too much time. They also found that feedback often arrived too late to be useful (it’s worth noting that most modules at York have a limited number of summative assessments, often just one at the end of the module). Related to this, they also noted that feedback was often very specific to a particular module or assessment type, and this meant that they were less likely to use it more generally. They also identified poor quality and inconsistent feedback as an issue, and something that made them less likely to engage with feedback.
Finally, a concern prevalent across the focus groups was to do with accessing their feedback. Most assessments at the University of York are now graded through Turnitin, and students need to access Turnitin to access their feedback (though their marks are available elsewhere). This means logging in multiple times (requiring 2FA) just to read feedback, and was flagged by several students as a big annoyance. On the other hand, students who still had closed-book, in-person exams faced significant issues accessing feedback on their performance, including a lack of opportunities to ask questions about their work and lack of availability of answer keys.
Guidelines for staff and students
It is important to keep in mind that feedback isn’t a one-way street – from sage academic to student – but a process. This is clearly reflected in the guidelines that our student partners originally came up with, and we in turn made sure to capture this in our staff guidelines as well.
In order to stress the importance of feedback as a process, one of the key proposals our student partners made was to encourage the use of feedback trackers. These are documents that allow you to track and make notes on feedback received all in one place. The design of the template feedback tracker we developed helps students identify key messages, themes, and concrete steps they can take to address issues raised by feedback they receive. By encouraging students to collect all their feedback in one place, this should also obviate the need to repeatedly log in to Turnitin.
For staff, encouraging the use of a feedback tracker document also has clear benefits. In our guidelines, we encourage colleagues to ask to see students’ feedback trackers when discussing their work, to get a better understanding of recurring issues as well as what the student has tried already. This allows for much more targeted support.
For students, the other recommendations also included further measures to encourage them to view feedback as a process, and to find and create opportunities for dialogue with markers. These included suggestions around how they can apply feedback to future work, and to make use of office hours. For students who are concerned about what to discuss with teachers, we encourage students to come prepared with questions and to discuss feedback with their peers as well as with academics.
For staff, guidelines fall into two categories. On the one hand, there are (probably expected) suggestions to incorporate “feedforward” as well as feedback, and to avoid being overly negative, ignoring what a student did well.
On the other hand, there are some guidelines which are also aimed at encouraging staff to treat feedback as a process – something that many of us may forget from time to time, especially given many competing demands on our time. Thus, we include guidelines relating to encouraging students to make use of office hours, and organizing alternative ways in which students can receive feedback on their work (such as cohort-wide feedback sessions). We also note that it’s important for academics to explain the importance of feedback to students, and the assessment and feedback opportunities available in a particular module.
Moving forward
As noted, the development of the staff- and student-focused guidelines is just the first step of this project. We hope to continue this research along a number of different tracks. First, there is a lot more we could do to understand why students – especially students from disadvantaged backgrounds – don’t engage with feedback. This may include statistical analysis of who does and who doesn’t read feedback in a timely manner.
Second, we ought to investigate the effect and effectiveness of implementing the guidelines and the feedback tracker we have developed. How effective could this be at changing student and staff practices? Does tracking feedback across multiple years have a measurable impact on student performance – and their satisfaction with the feedback they receive? These are questions we obviously can’t answer at this stage, but hope to return to in the future.
Finally, the guidelines we have developed now are based on the experience of students and staff in three departments at the University of York. It would be great to hear from people at other universities what experiences they have had, and how well our guidelines might transplant to different institutional and disciplinary contexts. Let us know your thoughts in the comments!