Feedback: ensuring that it leads to enhanced learning

Abstract

Feedback: ensuring it leads to enhanced learningFeedback involves much more than providing potentially useful information to learners about their work.The challenge is now on how to engage with learners in ways likely to result in discernable change and the nature of the conditions necessary to ensure that feedback discussions are likely to be acted upon.The main aspects of assessment and feedback drawn on here are those that focus on how assessment and feedback can contribute to the ongoing learning of students (and indeed all health professionals) and the need for feedback to actually influence what students do. Defining feedbackHigher education programmes are more frequently criticised in student surveys for deficiencies in assessment and feedback than any other aspect.This has resulted in renewed interest in what feedback is and how it can work effectively.In particular, it has led to recognition that feedback in clinical settings, just like feedback in any other context, must be characterised not solely in terms of inputs that are made, but effects that result.The definition of feedback 1 in Box 1 highlights this change in thinking.Teachers, or others offering feedback information, can therefore only confirm that learning has resulted from information provided if students act on it, to complete a feedback loop. 2