Welcome to day 2 of Five Days of Feedback!

Last year, the University's NSS Assessment and Feedback Expert Group identified the 5 qualities of good feedback.

We will be using these qualities as part of our Five days of feedback event in the week commencing 11th December. Every day, we will share case studies and top tips focusing on each of these qualities of good feedback in turn by email, on X and on LinkedIn.

The theme of today’s ‘5 days of feedback’ event is Specific. 

 Good feedback is specific to the student and their assignment, e.g., 'Your answer to Part B could be developed by doing XYZ'. Good feedback should also be clearly linked to the assessment task, the marking criteria, and the ILOs for the module. 

 The TEDM framework for writing specific feedback 

 Developed by Professor Willie McGuire at the University of Glasgow over the past few years, this framework focuses on modelling to students how they can improve their work by providing specific examples. It has four steps:  

• Tell the student that some aspect of their work is either effective or ineffective in meeting the assessment criteria   
• Explain why it has been effective or ineffective   
• Describe how the student could do better either in a later draft or in another assignment   
• Model exactly how the student could do better by showing them examples of how aspects of their work could be improved 

The TEDM framework helps encourage clear and specific feedback that is also feedforward, enabling the student to understand their performance in the current assessment as well as how they can improve in future assessments. 

What does specific feedback look like to students? 

We asked our Student Experience Officers and Graduate Business Partners what specific feedback looked like to them as a student. They said:  

 ‘Make sure it is obvious which part of the assignment the feedback is relating to (adding annotations straight on the assignment is a useful way for academics to highlight exactly where in your work their feedback relates to). Feedback feels useless unless you can know exactly what it is referring to.’ 

Additional resources: 

• Examples of specific feedback on the Education Toolkit 
• Introducing the TEDM Principle: Improving written feedback – Professor Willie McGuire et al. (2022) 

Don’t forget to add your good feedback practice to our Padlet! 

We are also running an online Q&A session on 14th December 1-2pm on How ELE2 and the Turnitin Feedback Studio can facilitate good feedback. If you would like to attend, email eduexe@exeter.ac.uk.