Part 5: Assignment feedback

Why start with feedback?

You will have received feedback on submitted formative and summative work. Your feedback is a great place to start to reflect on your successes, and for preparing for:

• your summative submission
• your next submission
• your re-submission

Feedback is developmental, which means it is designed to recognise your strengths and help you improve on areas that you can develop. As a result, feedback can feel personal, and you can experience feedback emotionally, which can all impact how you approach the next steps of engaging with that feedback.

However you respond, finding, understanding, and then using feedback are the key steps you need to take.

Finding your feedback

Finding your feedback is your first priority. Your module lecturer(s) are the ones responsible for providing you your feedback, and for making sure you know where to find it.

If you submitted your summative work through Turnitin, your feedback will be in the Turnitin submission point which is where you submitted your assignment on Moodle. If you submitted a different way, your module tutor will have given you instructions on how you will receive your feedback.

Working with your emotional responses to feedback

Feedback is developmental, which means it is designed to recognise your strengths and help you improve on areas that you can develop. As a result, feedback can feel personal, and you can experience feedback emotionally, which can all impact how you approach the next steps of engaging with that feedback.

Emotional responses to feedback are a normal, and for many different reasons (including neurodivergence, and your life circumstances) you will experience emotions more or less acutely than others.

Needing strategies to manage and work with your emotional responses is also normal. Before making a plan of action on your feedback, give yourself time and space to:

• Be happy, pleased or proud of what you’ve achieved
• Be sad or disappointed with an outcome
• Talk to people in your support network about how you feel
• Do something you enjoy to either celebrate, or to recover and ground yourself

Key resource: Dealing with emotions and feedback factsheet

Wellbeing support

We may all encounter a time when specialist mental health or emotional support can make a big difference. Dealing with feedback can be one of those times, and our Wellbeing team can offer a different kind of support if you need it.

Spectrum.Life have a range of self-guided meditation sessions you can access any time including sessions to manage overwhelm, boost confidence, reducing stress, and building self-compassion.

You can self-refer for mental health or wellbeing support, or use Spectrum.Life, our- free confidential counselling and wellbeing support service which is available to all students. Spectrum.Life is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.

Understanding and using feedback

The feedback you receive is designed to recognise strengths and support your development. Some developmental feedback may be directive (telling you exactly what to do, what to change, what resource or university service to use) or non-directive (more open questions for you to reflect on and the decide what to do).

Whatever the kind of feedback you receive, you need to gather, understand and then use it. Our ‘Making the Most of your Feedback’ worksheet gives you the opportunity to interpret and reflect on your feedback, identify areas for development, and to create an action plan to implement for your next piece of work.

Key resource: Making the most of your feedback worksheet (docx, 0.5MB)

This worksheet helps you to:

• Interpret the feedback
• Reflect on the feedback
• Make an action plan

When making your action plan, it is useful to gather the resources you will need to make your action plan work. Although you can receive feedback on all kinds of topics, these are the most common feedback areas we see and the resources that can help:

Learning support you should use

In addition to Wellbeing support, your academic tutors and study skills staff are great choices for understanding feedback and putting it into action.

Support from your module or academic tutors

An individual tutorial with your module or academic tutor could:

• provide you with guidance on understanding what was expected in the assessment
• how best to address any feedback you may have received
• give you a chance to further clarify your understanding.

In addition to a tutorial, if you are resitting, your tutor may have uploaded a re-assessment video. This will outline their guidance on:

• the assessment brief
• working with feedback
• common feedback themes for that assessment

Your lecturer will tell you whether resubmission tutorials are available for your module and assessment.

Personalised study support tutorials

Personalised 1 to 1 tutorials offer a space for you to develop your learning and skills, particularly following development feedback from your assignments.

Our Academic Liaison Librarians, Digital Training Tutors, Study Development Tutors, International Programmes Tutors, and the London Learning and Wellness team can support you with:

• critical reading
• note-taking
• writing an essay
• developing a digital portfolio
• preparing or planning a presentation
• improving referencing
• developing research skills
• working on your maths skills

Access and book support tutorials with any study support team:

• Through the Student Hub
• Through the Library Study Skills page