Best Practice

Giving effective student feedback

Effective student feedback is increasingly being recognised as a key influence on learning and student achievement. Matt Bromley offers some ideas to improve your feedback strategies.

An essential part of Assessment for Learning is giving feedback to students, both to assess their current achievement and to indicate what their next steps should be. 

Feedback is also ranked number one intervention strategy in terms of its influence on learning by both Professor John Hattie and the Educational Endowment Foundation (EEF): in other words, their research shows that improving the quality of feedback given to students has the biggest impact on learning of any classroom intervention. 

Improving the quality of feedback can also lead to the greatest levels of progress being made by students. Indeed, the EEF suggests that quality feedback can add eight months of extra learning. Prof Hattie, meanwhile, says that feedback has an effect size of 0.73. To put that figure into perspective, the average effect size is 0.4 and the highest is 1.2.

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