What is feedback?

Decades of research show that feedback is one of the most powerful ways to learn, both in education and in work.

However, decades of research also show that people are unhappy with feedback, and that feedback doesn’t always live up to its potential.

In this step we will investigate why this might be the case, and what we can do to make feedback work.

Traditionally, feedback was thought of as the comments other people give us about our work. The red ink put on a school student’s essay by their teacher, or the tracked changes comments from your boss on a report you wrote.

Recently, however, researchers have sought to reposition feedback from being just the information we receive, to also considering what we do with it. In this new ‘feedback as process’ way of viewing things, if we receive feedback comments but do nothing with them, there’s no learning.

You might be thinking, ‘This sure puts a lot more responsibility on the feedback receiver!’ – and you’d be right. In this view, we’re all required to do more. We can’t just be passive recipients, waiting for feedback to be done to us. We need to be actively involved.

The concept of feedback literacy was developed to help us think about all that is required of learners in feedback. It refers to what we know and can do to understand and use feedback to improve our work.

There are a few different models for this, and together with some colleagues, we recently published a paper simplifying them into five things you need to do in feedback:

1. Seek feedback information
2. Make sense of information
3. Use feedback information
4. Manage affect
5. Provide feedback information

In this course we will mainly be focused on the first, seek feedback information. Making that awkward request for your boss to comment on an email you want to send to an important client, asking a supervisor to observe how you serve a customer, or seeing if a family member will listen to you practice a PowerPoint presentation – these are all examples of seeking feedback.

It is well established that across a variety of contexts (including education and work), people who are better at seeking feedback perform better. It is also well established that people are not necessarily born with all the skills it takes to make a good feedback request. But fear not: it’s certainly something you can learn, and we are here to help.

Reflection

Think of the times when someone else has asked you for feedback.

From your experience, what makes for a good feedback request? Were there any feedback requests that you did not quite know how to respond to?

Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

If you haven’t done so already, please help us understand how people work with feedback by completing our survey as well.

References

Carless, D., & Boud, D. (2018). The development of student feedback literacy: enabling uptake of feedback. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 43(8), 1315–1325.