What’s important about feed forward?

While feedback focuses on a student’s current performance, and may simply justify the grade awarded, feed forward looks ahead to subsequent assignments and offers constructive guidance on how to do better. A combination of both feedback and feed forward helps ensure that assessment has a developmental impact on learning.

However, feed forward can only be effective if it is timely – ie received at a point when meaningful action can be taken. High-stakes assessments are often set towards the end of a module, term or semester, reducing opportunities for students to apply any feedback they receive. This issue has been exposed and addressed in three short videos and associated timeline resources produced by the ESCAPE project in the Jisc Curriculum Delivery programme.

The pressures created by large groups have also limited the extent to which subject tutors can give the personalised, detailed feedback that students can be expected to carry forward to their next assignment or test. To address this problem, traditional written feedback has in some circumstances been replaced by personalised feedback and whole-group feed-forward information recorded as video/audio files (see Feedback).

Since providing students with information about their strengths and weaknesses so often fails to generate change, projects in the Assessment and Feedback Programme  have  focused instead on enabling students to take responsibility for feeding forward  information they will need in subsequent assignments. Cover sheets submitted with each assignment combined with a reflective tool, for example, a wiki, as in the ACT process developed by the University of Dundee’s InterACT project, have resulted in a number of benefits. By means of the cover sheet, students have been able to engage in dialogue with their tutors, request feedback on specific issues and raise points relating to learning objectives. Undertaken over a course of study and stored in the VLE, such records create a bank of information about progress and performance that can be used by students or tutors to identify and address patterns and errors in approach or to celebrate a journey undertaken successfully while reflections in the wiki on the feedback they have received strengthens their understanding of how they are progressing. (See Longitudinal and ipsative assessment.) 

Making Assessment Count, a project in the Curriculum Delivery Programme, similarly worked to engage students in a more active response to feedback. In the MAC process, students write a reflective online journal about their feedback which, if made visible to tutors, can engender more focused tutorial discussions. The transfer of MAC processes to other institutions and subsequent adaptations have been evaluated by the MACE project which demonstrates the value of these processes not just in assessed coursework but also in carrying forward learning from other forms of assessment, including written examinations.

The concept of feed forward can be applied to longer spans of learning in which the development of individual students is informed by feeding forward assessment experiences and feedback themes from past assignments or modules and using these experiences to support current and future learning. This process produces in effect an assessment and feedback CV, as conceptualised by the Assessment Careers project.  Technology has been instrumental in facilitating and embedding this innovative approach by providing electronic storage and retrieval at scale combined with online access to, and storage of, the reflection and ipsative feedback generated by students as they progress through their chosen selection of modules.

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