This article explores strategies for providing valuable feedback to students in the Southern Cross Model, with a focus on enhancing student engagement and learning outcomes. It emphasizes the significance of clarity, specificity, timeliness, and alignment with Learning Outcomes (LOs).

Stages of the Assessment Cycle

Providing meaningful feedback to students is an essential part of the assessment cycle and an integral part of the Southern Cross Model. Find out more about the Assessment Cycle.

Click to view the stages of the Assessment Cycle

The assessment processes under the Southern Cross Model involve six key stages, as illustrated in the following graphic.

The importance of feedback

Assessment feedback provides students with information about their progress and performance, helps them identify their strengths and weaknesses, and provides guidance to improve. Feedback can serve as a motivational tool as tangible evidence of their own success, and encouragement to strive towards further development (Frost, 2014). Feedback also helps teachers identify areas where students may struggle and adjust their instruction to better meet their needs.

Timely feedback ensures students have the opportunity to implement feedback into future assessment. This is especially important as assessment under the Southern Cross Model must be appropriately scaffolded and interlinked across a unit or course, building student confidence and mastery (see Assessment principle 2). Without effective feedback, students will not have opportunities to reflect on how they can improve and succeed in their studies.

Providing high-quality feedback in the Southern Cross Model

High-quality feedback is clear, constructive, respectful and timely. It helps students to develop a positive attitude toward future learning. It also provides strong formative opportunities for your students to act on your comments and to learn how to better judge and evaluate the quality of their own work – and the work of others.

Due to the short 6-week terms in the Southern Cross Model, ensuring consistent and efficient marking along with providing concise, actionable and effective feedback to students is crucial. In the Southern Cross Model, students receive feedback just seven days after submitting their assessment (see Assessment, Teaching and Learning Procedures Policy: Section 4 (53)).

High-quality feedback focuses on the following:

Goals – the overall goals of the task as articulated by the assessment criteria
Achievement – the extent to which students have achieved these goals
Improvement – how students can improve their performance on the current task and for future assessment tasks.

Elements of high-quality feedback	Tips
Clear feedback	When structuring clear feedback remember to: focus on one point, on what has been done well give two points of practical actions to improve performance set an expectation for seeing this improvement in subsequent assessment submissions.
Constructive feedback	Constructive feedback clarifies and guides your performance expectations of your students. Try these tips for achieving constructive feedback. Take some time to discuss the assessment task and criteria to ensure it is well understood by all students. Provide students with examples of past students’ work, showing how and why that work meets the standards and criteria required.
Respectful feedback	Respectful feedback is inclusive of learners and does not inadvertently send the wrong signals. Feedback that is respectful should: focus on the issue, context, facts and behaviours avoid any personal and negative judgements about the student encourage and support the student by taking into account their background and context offer guidance about how and where to seek further assistance if needed. A final check for respectful feedback: Would you feel happy receiving the feedback yourself?
Timely feedback	Timely feedback should be received by the student at a time when meaningful action on the feedback can be taken. Timely feedback: is critical for student motivation promotes self-assurance reduces stress around academic performance.

Provide feedback opportunities early in the term

An early, low-stakes assessment task can help students understand how they are measuring up to standards, and how they can address areas that require their attention. For example, class quizzes or Readiness Assurance Tests (RAT) don't require labour intensive marking, but provide opportunities for feedback about student progress.

Providing specific examples and highlighting specific areas of strength or areas for improvement helps students understand what they have done well and what they need to work on. (Hattie & Timperley, 2007). However, providing overly detailed feedback on language errors is not perceived as useful by students (Glover & Brown, 2006).

Apply these questions to your own assessment design

How do you give formative feedback to ensure students can act on it? (e.g. H5P quiz which includes targetted feedback comments)
How do you set student expectations so they act on this feedback to influence their future learning and performance? (e.g. peer marking (iRATs), rubric design, or exemplars)
What kind of feedback contributes to students having either negative or positive attitudes towards their future learning? (e.g. focus on the positives, and how to improve rather than what is 'wrong')

Sharing Feedback

Overall feedback can be shared with the entire class, and should connect to the Unit Learning Outcomes (ULOs) of the assignment, noting areas that were handled well by most students, common misunderstandings, and how students can improve. This may include a discussion about the next integrated assessment task. Collective feedback can be incorporated into a class workshop or shared as an announcement via the Blackboard learning site.

Tips for effective feedback

Organise your feedback around three central points. One point may be acknowledging what has been done well. The remaining two points could focus on practical things students could do to improve their current grade.
Focus the feedback on the skills and knowledge students are trying to develop according to the Unit Learning Outcomes (ULOs), rather than focusing on correct grammar, spelling or expression issues.
Consider providing collective feedback to support students to engage with feedback.
Check that students know how to access their feedback via Blackboard. This is particularly relevant for first-year students.

Using feedback for student improvement

Over time, your students need to become increasingly independent, lifelong learners who actively judge, improve and drive their own learning according to their needs. Feedback plays a role in helping students to develop the capacity to judge and improve their learning and work. Boud (2010) goes further to say:

Students’ own skills of judgement are developed by their utilisation of feedback, guidance provided by those already inducted into the culture and standards of the discipline, and opportunities to grow their own skills of critical appraisal. They need to be able to seek and employ feedback from a variety of sources to develop a full range of outcomes from their studies.”

Students need to be encouraged to progressively take responsibility for their assessment and feedback. This involves encouraging students to:

develop critical thinking skills, including independent judgment and the ability to self-critique
take responsibility for assessing and providing feedback on the quality of their own performance and that of others through peer assessment tasks
develop confidence over time to evaluate the quality of their work against appropriate standards (professional or otherwise)
learn to self-monitor and self-regulate their learning.

Developing feedback literacy

Traditionally feedback has been viewed as reporting after assessment has been completed, rather than a process that promotes interpretation and thinking about progress. Research shows that students are not satisfied how feedback is commonly used and approached through assessment processes (Carless & Boud, 2018).

For feedback processes to be enhanced, students need both appreciation of how feedback can operate effectively and opportunities to use feedback within the curriculum"

Feedback literacy involves students appreciating feedback, making judgments about their own work, managing the affects of criticism, and taking action based on feedback (Carless & Boud, 2018). Students who engage with these feedback processes are more likely to maximise the benefits from feedback. This is not a natural state for many and requires arming students with the skills to take action on feedback.

You can support students to develop their feedback literacy by addressing the following areas:

Appreciating feedback: Students commonly view feedback as 'telling', instead help students to recognise the value of feedback and how they can actively use feedback by developing their own knowledge and skills about it.
Making Judgments: Share strategies that help students constructively assess their own work, and the work of their peers. Students need to be developing 'evaluative judgment': a capability to make decisions about the quality of work of oneself and others.
Managing Affect: It’s easy to slip into a defensive mode when receiving feedback. Have discussions about the difference between feedback and criticism, and the benefits of maintaining ‘emotional equilibrium’. Move feedback from what have you done to what can you do, challenging students to adopt new perspectives.
Taking Action: As your students develop these capabilities, you’ll observe a more action-oriented approach to feedback, where they start to develop strategies to implement feedback and improve their work.

Supporting feedback literacy

Carless & Boud (2018) suggest two learning activities that can develop students’ feedback literacy:

Peer feedback: Students produce a draft assignment, receive feedback from peers and then revise the same assignment.
Analysing exemplars: show students the standard of work expected. These processes refine their ability to discriminate between works of different levels and sharpen their capacities to make academic judgments.

Further Resources

The following resources will support you to provide more effective feedback.

SCU College Feedback Template: Using a feedback template is a good way to make marking more manageable while delivering succinct and actionable feedback to students.
How to write constructive feedback for quiz questions: strategies to provide feedback specific to quizzes.
Inclusive Feedback Checklist Susie Macfarlane from the School of Exercise and Nutrition Sciences at Deakin University has developed a checklist which provides useful suggestions for writing effective feedback that supports and engages students.

ISCM Assessment Design resource and Practical Guide

The academic Portfolio Office and the Centre for Teaching and Learning have developed a comprehensive Southern Cross Model resource, including an Assessment Design Module. For detailed guidance about the implementation of assessments, please visit the Practical Guide: Assessment in the Southern Cross model. Both of these resources include further information about feedback.

Tools for providing Feedback

The following digital tools are used at Southern Cross University to support marking, grading, and feedback.

Marking assessment using Turnitin Feedback Studio: this article provides guidance for using Turnitin feedback Studio to mark and provide feedback to students.
Marking Blackboard assignments and providing feedback: this article provides guidance on marking and providing feedback using a Bb assignment.
Setting up a Blackboard test (quiz) for summative assessment: this article provides guidance for setting up a Bb test and providing feedback to students.
Blackboard Group assessments: this article provides guidance for using Bb groups and providing feedback to students working in groups.

Feedback Resources for Students

The following Student Learning zone quick guides can be shared with students to encourage their uptake of feedback.

Papers and publications

Authentic feedback: Supporting learners to engage in disciplinary feedback practices (Dawson et al., 2020) this paper links authentic assessment and authentic feedback.
Feedback tool kit: 10 feedback case studies or ideas this handout developed by the Higher Education Academy links to 10 case study resources.
The value and effectiveness of feedback in improving students’ learning and professionalizing teaching in higher education (Mamoon-Al-Bashir, Kabir & Rahman, 2016) this paper highlights the importance of developing feedback skills in higher education institutions.

References

Carless, D. & Boud, D. (2018). The development of student feedback literacy: enabling uptake of feedback, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 43:8, 1315-1325, DOI: 10.1080/02602938.2018.1463354

Boud, D. (2010). Assessment 2020: Seven propositions for assessment reform in higher education. Sydney, Australia: Australian Learning and Teaching Council.

Dawson, P., Carless, D. & Pui Wah Lee, P. (2021) Authentic feedback: supporting learners to engage in disciplinary feedback practices, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 46:2, 286-296, DOI: 10.1080/02602938.2020.1769022

Frost, D., Smith, S., & Mainhard, M. T. (2014). Teacher feedback as a motivator of students’ cognitive and affective engagement. Educational Psychology Review, 26(1), 23-50.

Glover, C., & Brown, E. (2006). Written feedback for students: Too much, too detailed or too incomprehensible to be effective? Bioscience Education, 7(1), 1-12.

Hattie, J., & Timperley, H. (2007). The power of feedback. Review of Educational Research, 77(1), 81-112.

(Please note - it's better to refer to the Online version rather than export, as it's always up to date)