Feedback is how a student (or teacher) gains insight into the student’s performance. It can clarify how the student is progressing. For the student, it is not only important to know where he is in the learning process, but also where he should go (what is the required final skill level?) and what he needs to do to get there.

For feedback to be effective, however, it needs to meet certain criteria. You can read more about effective feedback in higher education in the documents in the right column.

There are many ways to offer feedback. A critical factor is who is offering the feedback. The teacher (the expert), fellow students (peers) or the student himself (self). For each type, it is essential that there is a clear framework for what the feedback applies to and when something is up to standards or not.

Several tools are available to help you provide students with more frequent, quicker, more detailed or more focused feedback. Certain tools are well suited for focused individual feedback, while others can help you provide feedback quickly in large groups.

• Rubrics
• Kahoot!

Expert feedback

With expert feedback, you, the teacher and expert, provide feedback on a student’s work. The advantage is that you have the expertise to tell whether the work is good or not and that you know the elements this evaluation needs to be based on. The drawback is that you may have so much experience that you might not be explicit enough in your criteria. Even as an expert, it is important to use clear evaluation criteria. It will give you some support when providing evaluations, it will increase the reliability of your evaluation and it will give the student more insight.