Clearing the Final Hurdle: Getting Students to Engage with Feedback in Higher Education

Abstract

Higher Education within the UK over the last fifty years has increasingly been defined by the end product and this means that both students and lecturers tend to focus on the outcome rather than the process. For many students this means that assessments are seen as barriers to their final grade, rather than as a support to help them reflect on their performance. The purpose of this paper is to explore how students can become more engaged with the comments made on assessments. It concludes by suggesting that whilst audio feedback has proved to be successful in this respect, video feedback might well be an even better way of encouraging students to listen to what they are being told and then improve subsequent work.