 Feedback. What a right kind of constructive. Supportive. What to say. More specific than that. Okay, let's talk feedback. This is one of those things that gets talked about a lot and I really do mean a lot. It's a constant source of comment from students. It's the subject of almost every other talk at teaching and learning conferences. And it's basically not just a question but an entire section on the National Student Survey. And the results of that really do stick out. One of these things is not like the others. But as I mentioned in the video on lead tables and rankings, when it comes to the NSS, we don't actually know how students respond to these questions. We don't fully understand what feedback means in this specific context. But we do know that it's influenced by what people perceive to be feedback. So the question is, do we as universities provide poor feedback? Or do students just not know how to recognise and use it? Yes. The answer is a bit of both. We as universities do need to do a little better in providing better feedback, stuff that's more useful, more applicable, better signposted. And we need to structure assessments in a way that takes advantage of the ability to provide those constructive comments. At the same time, we have some medications that suggest students only really view something as feedback if it's written and it's written physically on the work itself. Like that makes some sense. That's how feedback works at school. It's the model that's influenced a decade or more of your life. And it's the most obvious candidate for what feedback is. But it is a very limited view of the idea. And that perception is a big barrier to us providing the better feedback. So I'm going to spend the rest of this video talking about all of this. What is feedback? Where does it actually come from? Where can you find it? And how do you use it? Straight away, what is feedback? Well, feedback, as you might expect, is any information you can use to improve. It's not just necessarily giving you the right answer. Feedback is used to undo misconceptions, to course correct bad habits, or to improve your performance. Importantly, feedback also isn't just about improving marks and grades. That is a little bit of it. And certainly, if you take feedback into account, your marks tend to improve. But it's not a straightforward case that all feedback is, is just a list of poops that you have to jump through to get a better grade. We can sometimes do that very specifically. For instance, if you submit a project report draft and you've written captions under each graph to the effect of this graph shows whatever, we can say you need to put numbers on these and refer to them in the text. And then you return it with figure one, this graph shows whatever, and a paragraph above it saying as shown in figure one, you'll likely get a better mark because that is better communication. That's really simplistic though. And it's probably going to only boost it one or two percent on the grand scheme of things. Report feedback may require you to do a lot more work than that. For instance, your draft might have a poor discussion of some results. So feedback may ask you to go away, read a couple of papers, integrate them better into your text, and then you have to synthesize a better discussion by putting your own results in the context of that wider reading that you've done. And that's hard. It's a big reward at the end of it. An improvement like that wouldn't just be a few percent. It could easily be an entire degree classification higher, but it's not something we can guide you through step by step. The feedback there isn't what gains you the extra marks. It's the effort you put in to take on board and learn those lessons. We also cannot practically provide every single project student with a blow by blow method and tick box guide to every single instance where they need to improve and address things. If we did that, it would likely need to be iterated on again and again with more specific corrections. And you know, at that point, you realized the core problem. Who's doing the work here? If the supervisor needs to provide endless detailed feedback for a student to improve, eventually you reach a point where the project is more the supervisor's work than the students. And then is it fair to award a higher greatest one who had to do that? So that's the key tension that exists with feedback. There's a balance between course correcting guidance and just pretty much doing the work for you. This is why we try to clarify responsibilities about feedback in advance. For instance, marking one draft of the report only, providing some personal feedback and some class feedback, giving some kind of indication of where you will find it. An even better way out of this tension is to stop thinking of feedback as a one way process where we continually fire comments back to students. Instead, feedback is a cycle. And this is much more interesting and a more useful model. But students often don't think of it this way. Or at least they're not trained to think of it this way. In this model, feedback loops between a student and an instructor. So the students submit something or does tasks and then the instructor provides feedback, the student then acts on and reflects on the feedback and tells the instructor about it. And that ends the cycle. It makes us ready to start again. This is something you see far more often when it comes to course feedback. The things that students relate back to their departments by staff, student committees or course reps, you know the whole you tell us what you want and will tell you why you can't have it sort of thing. Departments that do this well tend to complete the feedback cycle by explicitly saying what was asked and what was done about it, even if the answer is no, and communicating that effectively back to students. So that's feedback acting as a cycle of points made it's back to dawn. And then that action players out Andrew's responded to in turn. It's not just a series of rapid fire comments going only in one direction. What does this mean for students? Well, it means that feedback is a continual process. It doesn't start when you get red pens scribbled on your lab portal, whatever the digital equivalent we use now is, it means you take your feedback forward to the next stage. But there's a problem here. Normally, you only see an assessment once with exams, for instance, once those questions are asked, they're gone, they are never seen again. This is like one of the main defining characteristics of an exam. feedback on exams is what possible, but you need to know what to look for. If all you're looking for is the right answer, you're not really going to get the opportunity to apply it again. It's gone. The comment might justify the grade. But it won't be useful later on. But if you know why the answer was wrong, and what led you down an incorrect path, that could be very useful. So an exceptionally common problem in exams is that people leave out units on their calculations, and that gets flagged up as a reason that marks were lost. That is feedback. It's a big damn hint to start adding them again. You won't say those specific questions again, you might not see that specific unit again, but you should start adding units. But you should also consider patterns that only you can see. Do you keep running out of time and exams? Then you need to work on your technique and learn what to focus on. Because I can't actually tell you that I just get an answer booklet back. I can't tell if you've not answered a question because you don't know it, or because you spent all your time on something else. You need to read the paper thoroughly first and plan what your answer and in what order. That's also in a way it's a form of feedback, it's reflecting on your own experience. So in some respects, feedback is like a form of inductive reasoning, you need to learn the broader and more general ideas and rules from observations, comments and discussions. It can be as simple as say if I were to tell you to format a graph in a certain way, I actually mean to format all of them that way. But I'm not going to highlight every instance why you need to do it. That would be a waste of time and pretty insulting to your intelligence as well. It can however be much more complicated. If you're often seeing low marks for results and quality of results, you need to look at how you're presenting them and describing them. You can't just dump a roll table of data from an Excel screenshot and expect to keep getting away with it forever. You need to start improving those sections. And that is of course, hard. If it were easy, there would be no need to provide feedback in the first place. But you can always ask feedback is that cycle. If you read something and you're unsure what it means, ask for a clarification, have a go at interpreting it yourself and implementing it yourself. But do ask for more if you need it and not just more feedback, not just more words, be specific, engage with the cycle. Make suggestions for what specific areas you want feedback on. Say how you interpret existing comments and ask if that's the right way because that's the cycle. You can't just learn from getting a larger quantity of feedback. You need to do a bit of work on your end that lets you ask better questions and get a better quality of feedback. OK, let's look at a real world example for a moment. I once wrote a paper describing a new teaching lab practical where the reviewer comments, effectively are feedback from peers, said that the results weren't up to the robust standards of the journal and this couldn't be replicated in a teaching lab and it was unclear what the aim was. All words to that effect because it turns out I never saved the reviewer document to my Google Drive. Anyway, what was wrong? Well, it turned out we really hadn't established what the point was. We knew what it was. We just hadn't written it down. So I rewrote most of the introduction to clarify the context and provide the objectives, sustainability, the structure, determination, how it fits into course curricula and so on. The reviewer comments, you know, the feedback also mentioned about not being able to replicate everything. And I noticed where we had said things like, oh, we've sometimes seen this synthesis go wrong and we've seen various colours of products. And well, yeah, that's not very specific or robust, right? You need people to understand what you did and what could go wrong. So I added how there were specific colour contaminations, a brown, a purple, a red. What we thought each one was, well, we had to do the work there, not because the reviewer was giving insufficient feedback, but because we were the only people who knew what to write. The reviewer could never have said, you need to talk about how this is sustainable synthesis. They were coming out of blind. They wouldn't know. They couldn't have said things like, you need to change this sentence to say your purple solid is potentially a nitrogen adduct. Or whatever it was. Because how would they know that? They didn't have the answer. We did. We had to identify the floor and address it. So a key feature of feedback is that it aims to draw better answers out of you. It's not exactly telling you what to do. It's guidance on to a better path and often a path only you know how to describe. So far we see what feedback is. It's more like a cycle. It's a back and forth conversation where both sides have to do some work. And it's also aimed at getting you to improve in general ways that can be broadly interpreted rather than correctly minor specific answers one by one. But so far we've assumed everything is written down. And I hinted at the beginning that this is a very narrow way of thinking about feedback and it is feedback can happen anywhere and at any time. It can be a quick conversation in a teaching lab. A brief discussion about how and why to assemble gasware. That's feedback. It's information used to make you better at things. It could be responses in lectures. We often set workshop questions, tutorial questions, online quizzes, and we look at the answers. And when we discuss those, especially in a flipped or blended learning style, that's feedback. So it doesn't need to be written. It can be verbal and it can be formal and it can be informal too. It doesn't always have to be attached to a piece of work. We have pointers and hints delivered to the whole class, which you can learn from. And you can learn from others in your group as well. What do they do? What does their personal feedback say? What difficulties do they encounter? All of this is a form of valuable feedback because it achieves that objective of making you better at what you want to do. Not everything is going to be prefixed with, and this is your feedback and I am feeding back to you. Although there's an argument that if we did that a lot, our NSS scores would improve without having to change anything. Like, like seriously, when I was a PhD student, we used to, like, you do debrief sessions. And then we changed the name to feedback sessions. And then suddenly the I received enough feedback scores on the evaluations went up. Literally nothing else changed, just the name. But you know. So if I have a name here, it's to preempt that sort of thing. Feedback is just a word. It's not a magic spell. The actual act of improving by interacting with your instructor appears is what you need to look out for. So practically, what can you do with feedback once you've learned to recognise it? But one thing is to log it, write it down. This helps with reflection. You need to understand what you've done, what's good, what's bad and how to improve, whether it's in a notebook or an electronic file or something else. Keep track of it and try to reflect on what it means to you. That's hard, definitely. It can be quite stressful. You're reading criticism of your work, work you might have a lot of pride in. And it's hard to be told that it's bad. But do remember to write down the good stuff. Any good feedback should also tell you what you need to keep on doing and definitely act on it. If I tell you to stop putting linear trend lines through nonlinear data, then stop putting linear trend lines through nonlinear data, please. Sometimes it is that simple. You should also try to engage with what's known as feed forward. Yeah, it's a bit weird and jargony. Yeah, I'm sure. But this is basically feeding back to you about your mistakes before you make them, because that makes sense, right? I have all this experience of what I know that students are definitely going to do wrong. So there's no reason that I should wait until you do it before I tell you about it. I mean, I do this a lot. I always tell people to get familiar with how big a moment of inertia is and how long a bond is, because I know people will blindly tap into a calculator and say that the hydrogen chloride bond is like 600 kilometres long. I point that out in advance and tell people to sanity check it and look in particular places for mistakes as a form of feedback that happens to come before the mistake is made. So that's a small tour around feedback. There's a lot of it about, but you need to be open to it. There's no one simple trick. There's no easy set of hoops to jump through. But if you can learn to recognise it and you can learn to use it, then you're set up to succeed pretty much forever, because that's just