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Feedback: What’s in it for you?

When you think of feedback in an academic context, many of you will think about the overall mark assigned to a recent assessment, exam, or piece of coursework you submitted as part of your degree.

But feedback is so much more than that. It’s essential to your learning experience at Loughborough, and it helps you to understand what you’re doing well and where you can improve.  

Sometimes feedback you receive will be in a more obvious form eg a grade or comments from your lecturer, and sometimes it may be harder to distinguish.  

In this article, we’ll provide an overview of the different forms of feedback, and how you can use it to succeed in your studies. 

The power of feedback 

There are multiple benefits to engaging with the different forms of feedback you’ll receive throughout your degree. These include: 

  1. Helping you to understand your strengths and where you can improve 

  1. Enhancing your learning, progression and performance 

  1. Improving your future assessments and work 

Recognising feedback 

As mentioned above, some forms of feedback are not so obvious. Written and audio comments, grades, 1-1 feedback in person and WebPA might be some of the sources you’re more familiar with. 

But have you utilised the feedback shared with your cohort on LEARN and more informally in the classroom? And what about the results from smaller tasks and quizzes you might carry out, but don’t contribute to your overall module mark? Below are a few other examples you might not have recognised as a form of feedback: 

  • Informal conversations with a staff member about your performance 

  • Responses to questions and enquiries via LEARN 

  • Model answer solutions which provide an opportunity to compare your work against a correct answer 

  • Q&A opportunities during taught sessions via Vevox or verbally. 

Understanding your feedback 

There are multiple words or phrases commonly used in feedback, but for some students it may feel like they blur into one or don’t make complete sense without a fuller explanation.  

If you’ve seen phrases used in your feedback such as ‘Be more concise’, ‘Critically evaluate’, ‘Clarity’ and ‘Originality’ but you’re not sure what any of them mean, you can check out a full list online

Further support 

If you’re not sure how to access or download feedback on your work in LEARN or Turnitin, check out this tutorial

If you have any questions regarding your feedback, contact your Lecturer in the first instance. You can also discuss any comments in your assignments with your Personal Academic Tutor.  

If you’d like additional support on any areas you’d like to improve, take a look at our Library Learning Support resources or the Academic Writing Support service.    

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