As students become more ‘distant’, can feedback still hit the mark?

Feedback is among the most powerful tools in educators’ professional development toolkit. But this power is limited when – in closely attending to the type, amount or timeliness of the advice we give – we neglect how students engage with it. Recognising this point, effective feedback is increasingly seen as a dialogue, in which students have responsibility for seeking information and then making sense of and applying it.

Other transformations to higher education, though, are making constructive dialogue between educators and students rarer and more challenging. We wanted to understand whether the approach of treating feedback as a two-way street could survive and thrive when educator dialogue may increasingly be at a premium. And, as part of our ongoing project, we were willing to go to prison to find out.

The challenges of feedback from afar

We recently visited four high-security prisons in Queensland, Australia, where we spoke with about 60 incarcerated people studying higher education programmes in some of the most distanced and asynchronous modes of learning imaginable. Although some of these prisoners use digital learning technologies that simulate an “online” learning experience, they have no access to the internet nor direct interaction with their lecturers. Here, the reality of feedback is that it is a one-way street, with rare chances for discussion, clarification or recourse.

These incarcerated people are not your typical students, but we sought to understand their experiences of receiving feedback as extreme forms of otherwise common experiences in mainstream higher education. If feedback can be made effective in a high-security prison, we thought, then it can work for those students who ever more frequently study online, at a distance and flexibly, or those who for various reasons opt not to attend lectures on campus, and learn asynchronously around other commitments. 

• What students told us ‘good’ feedback means to them
• Reframing feedback as a valuable learning tool
• Why we should be giving feedback via video

The availability of these alternative modes of learning has become important for supporting equity, widening access to higher education among students living in remote areas, those with certain disabilities, employment or caring responsibilities, and others who formerly faced challenges to accessing universities’ campuses. Asynchronous learning offers students additional flexibility, enabling study with minimal – or perhaps even no – direct interactions between students and educators. But how can we ensure our feedback is used proactively by students whom we might never meet, when dialogue is rarer, more detached and increasingly mediated by technology? 

The research literature on feedback in distance and flexible learning contexts offers plenty of evidence on how to give learners the highest-quality advice, but says little about how we support those learners to engage with and extract value from it. In the absence of clear answers to these questions, we therefore risk sliding back towards weaker, one-directional approaches to feedback. All we can promise these students – one might reason – is that they’ll receive good and timely advice. We must then cross our fingers that it hits the mark. As one experienced distance educator put it to us: “You just have to hope they are self-directing.”

Looking for answers ‘behind bars’

Relying on students to self-direct their engagement with feedback without support is, in our experience, a huge gamble. This is an underestimated and extraordinarily difficult skill for anyone to master. The incarcerated students we spoke with echoed common frustrations with feedback that we hear from mainstream student populations: they struggled to understand the advice, didn’t know what to do with it, felt ill-equipped to do what was advised, and felt demotivated and unenthused.

But the prison context gave each of these challenges a distinct flavour. Free time for engaging with feedback was the one thing these students had in abundance, and yet most described the feedback as unworthy of their time. Their lack of opportunities for dialogue, combined with having few resources for managing their understanding of and expectations around feedback, magnified these students’ feelings of isolation, confusion and self-doubt. And when the high pressure they put on themselves to excel was not rewarded with high grades, they found themselves lacking strategies for transforming their disappointment into fuel for future success.

Understanding incarcerated students’ challenges helped us to envisage the kinds of tools that could equip them – and anyone studying autonomously, asynchronously or at a distance – to make the most of feedback when dialogue is less readily available. Indeed, we concluded from these discussions that the missing link is not educator dialogue per se, but scaffolding. We must teach our students ways of finding meaning and value in feedback, even when it is unclear or not constructive. They need ways to decide what to do next and to stay motivated when feedback seems contradictory or non-specific, and ways of confidently evaluating their own progress when feedback is infrequent, untimely or brief. But ultimately, the tools and resources we provide as scaffolds must equip students to use these techniques by themselves, independently. 

Students might benefit, for example, from initially organising their feedback based on the level of effort each comment requires, how clearly they understand it or the emotional reaction it evokes. So, interactive tools that simplify this organising process, and guidance resources that then point students to targeted ways of handling the different comment sets, could be invaluable scaffolds. Likewise, peers can support students in recognising and moving beyond their knee-jerk reactions to feedback that is confusing or critical of their work. Yet our prison discussions reminded us not to take for granted that students know how to make their conversations with peers constructive rather than merely cathartic. Could self-directed, interactive activities assist them to formulate better probing questions that evoke more challenging perspectives from their peers? Scaffolding, again, is key, and through our current project we are starting to develop some of these tools.

Our aim in making these arguments is neither to deny the value or importance of dialogic feedback where educator dialogue is possible nor to excuse poor-quality or neglectful feedback. Rather, we must discourage a false dichotomy between dialogic feedback and poor feedback. As our average student becomes more distant, and our relationship with them less dialogic, designing learning environments that scaffold their active engagement with feedback is becoming a more – not less – important priority.

Robert Nash is head of psychological research at the National Institute of Teaching in the UK, visiting associate professor in the School of Psychology at Aston University, UK, and associate editor of Applied Cognitive Psychology. Kieran Balloo is an adjunct senior research fellow in the Institute for Resilient Regions at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia, and a visiting senior research fellow in the Surrey Institute of Education at the University of Surrey, UK.

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