Feedback emPower Tools: How to Make Your Feedback Go Further
By Carolina Kuepper-Tetzel & Rob Nash
Dr Rob Nash
For today’s blog post, I interviewed Dr Rob Nash who together with Prof Naomi Winstone and Dr Kieran Balloo created the website Feedback emPower Tools. Feedback emPower Tools sets out to help learners engage and process feedback they receive. For learners it can be challenging to engage with feedback, perhaps because they either do not fully understand the feedback, do not know how to best use the feedback for future assessments, and/or are too anxious to process it in the first place (1). For educators, it can be difficult to help individual students with processing feedback as the reasons for the issues students experience can vary widely. Feedback emPower Tools offers a free resource that is packed with information, activities, and guidance to help students make the best use of feedback (2). Feedback emPower Tools is tailored to students and teachers at schools or in Higher Education alike but can also be used as a platform for activities as part of continuing professional development (CPD).
CKT: Before we discuss the Feedback emPower Tools website in more detail, Rob, can you introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your background?
RN: Sure! I’m a researcher based in England with a background in studying the psychology of memory and cognition; I’m also a National Teaching Fellow. I previously worked as an academic in UK universities for about 15 years, where my research interests turned increasingly toward the psychology and practice of feedback. I’m fascinated by understanding why receiving feedback is such a difficult and unwanted experience for so many of us, and how we can work practically around those psychological challenges. These days I work for the National Institute of Teaching (NIoT), which is a specialist higher education institution focused on improving professional development for school teachers and leaders. My role there is Head of Psychological Research, so I have the privilege of working with new and experienced teachers on all manner of professional development research, including on feedback.
CKT: When someone visits the Feedback emPower Tools website, what do you hope they immediately understand about its purpose?
RN: We hope people will straight away see the website’s strapline: “Make Your Feedback Go Further”, and that they’ll reflect on how powerful that goal would be, if we could achieve it. Feedback can be so valuable and informative, but we often fail to extract its full potential because it’s just so difficult to use effectively. So hopefully visitors will immediately understand that the website is focused on giving people – especially students, but not necessarily only students! – the tools and knowledge they need in order to make feedback more useful for themselves.
RN: We also hope people will find the site and resources straightforward and user-friendly. There are tons of incredible flashy resources and tech solutions out there in the world, for all sorts of educational purposes, but we felt strongly that our goal should be to make our site and our resources as simple and accessible as possible, so that any learner could dive in and take away something valuable.
CKT: From browsing the website, I immediately noticed the clear structure and can imagine that students and teachers will find it easy to navigate the many resources. What inspired you and your colleagues to create Feedback emPower Tools in the first place?
RN: Long story – I hope you’ll forgive a long answer! Over a decade ago, Naomi Winstone (University of Surrey) and I created a resource called the ‘Developing Engagement with Feedback Toolkit (DEFT)’, which was intended to help teachers to build their students’ skills in engaging with feedback. The toolkit has since been used really widely all over the world, and we’ve been excited to learn about the ways and contexts in which it’s been used. In one example, we learned that thanks to our fantastic colleague Kieran Balloo (Southern Cross University), the DEFT was being used in high-secure prisons in Queensland, Australia with adults who were pursuing higher education programmes whilst incarcerated.
RN: An opportunity arose for us to explore and build more on this kind of impact. Kieran, Naomi and I got some funding to develop a new resource, which we’d initially imagined as an updated DEFT for more diverse kinds of learning contexts, but which ultimately evolved into something quite different. As part of this funding, I travelled out to Australia a couple of times, where Kieran and I visited some of the prisons to speak with incarcerated students about how feedback works in such an extreme learning context. We also visited some ‘Country Universities Centres’: regional hubs where students in rural and remote areas can come to study, with access to fast internet, study resources and access to local learning advisors.
RN: Through our visits we became really attuned to the idea that expecting people to use feedback effectively relies on a ‘hidden curriculum’. Doing this well might be challenging for most of us, yet some students can surmount these challenges through their ready access to their teachers, to formal and informal mentoring, to helpful resources and opportunities, and more. Others cannot. So, the core idea and shape of Feedback emPower Tools was borne heavily from our conversations that followed those visits. We realised that if it were possible for students in a high-secure prison to get more value from feedback, then our solutions might also benefit many other types of modern learners: for example, those pursuing a qualification by distance learning; those who study asynchronously alongside part-time employment; those who feel anonymous in a massive cohort and unable to access one-to-one support; those with only intermittent access to the internet; and many more.
CKT: Oh wow, that is such an interesting back story. It is sometimes so surprising to find out what the impetus was for an idea that comes to life. Thanks for sharing. Now, what principles or theoretical frameworks have shaped this resource in particular?
RN: Several years ago, I was talking to one of my undergraduate personal tutees about their experiences of feedback. I casually mentioned that they might sometimes consider putting their feedback aside for a few days before they engage with it deeply, so that they might move past their initial emotional reaction and make room for a clearer and more critical perspective. I’ll always remember how the student’s eyes lit up at this moment: “Are we allowed to do that?!” For this student, moving them forward with feedback was partly a case of just giving them a really simple—perhaps to some of us, even obvious—strategy, and helping them realise that using these kinds of self-regulation strategies are key to effective learning, rather than a sign of failure as a student.
RN: Similarly, when Kieran and I met incarcerated students and heard the feedback challenges they experienced, we asked whether they might ever collate all of the feedback they received into a single electronic document, as a kind of ‘feedback portfolio’ that wouldn’t get accidentally deleted whenever their offline study devices were periodically refreshed. This suggestion struck such a strong chord with some of the students: ‘Keep your feedback; review it sometimes; here’s an easy way’. Yet again, here we saw the power of putting simple strategies and tools directly into learners’ hands. On the drive home, Kieran and I chatted about how the solution a student needs most isn’t always a jazzy platform overflowing with tech, but is often a blank page and an idea of what to do with it.
RN: So, at its core, Feedback emPower Tools is really about unpacking that hidden curriculum, helping learners to see how they can take greater control of the feedback they receive even when it seems vague or even wrong. As you’d expect, our own research has underpinned a lot of our thinking. In particular, our 2017 systematic review (2) worked through the kinds of skills and habits that sit behind learners’ proactive engagement with feedback, and the kinds of interventions that had been tested and evaluated (and there’s been so much research since then!). But loads of really powerful work by other researchers also shaped our thinking, both from the world of educational research (particular shout-out to Prof Phill Dawson whose research and wisdom were frequently in our minds!) and from other behavioural science domains that don’t always obviously overlap, like health sciences, and consumer behaviour. As psychologists we like the idea that engagement with feedback effectively boils down to a bunch of socio-emotional, cognitive, and behavioural processes (3) that we can study. So, a lot of the time that we spent on designing activities and tools for the website, we were thinking explicitly about which of these psychological processes we were trying to influence, and how.
CKT: Well, we at the Learning Scientists love a research-informed resource that focuses on unveiling small, but effective tweaks in learning and teaching practice. From a practical student perspective: How do you envision students using the Feedback emPower Tools website? What are different approaches to interact with the resource?
RN: We expect and hope that different students will find different parts of elements of the website more- vs. less-useful. Some might arrive with a clear idea of a specific feedback problem they want to work through, or that they want advice on. Others might not know where to start: one thing we’ve added to the site for those people is an AI chatbot, which suggests some helpful starting points based on users’ descriptions of their challenges with feedback. Some students might want to just watch some short (~3-minute) videos to pick up tips on various feedback topics. Others will want to engage more deeply, and to start making sense of their own feedback using some of our tools.
RN: In the best scenario, we hope that some students will come back to engage with a certain tool time and time again. For example, one of the areas on the site is about setting goals and planning actions, and there’s a simple tool that guides students through a reflective process of transforming their feedback into a specific action plan. Students can download their action plan as a plain-text document and might create and download one of these each time they’ve received substantive feedback so that they’re easy to collate, track, and monitor. There’s nothing in this tool that a student couldn’t do themselves, in principle, but the scaffolding of this reflection is what we believe is most essential.
CKT: I believe that Feedback emPower Tools is not only for students, but can be used effectively by educators, too. How can educators make the most of the website?
RN: That’s right. We wanted the website to be accessible to any student (or learner) who wanted to engage directly with the resources and tools, and we hope we’ve achieved that. But we believe educators have a really powerful role to play in supporting students to become expert users of feedback. We think of so-called ‘feedback literacy’ as a set of crucial skills and habits that are rarely taught explicitly in formal education and yet are often taken for granted. If educators play an overt and intentional role in preparing learners with these skills and habits, then they’re not only supporting them academically, but also preparing them for workplaces — and, frankly, even for aspects of their personal lives! — where they’ll continue needing to engage constructively with feedback.
RN: Probably the most important thing for educators to know about the website is that everything is completely free. We’ve licensed all the resources under Creative Commons, which means that anyone can take them, share them, embed them in a learning management system, even adapt them to suit their own context. Whatever you like – as long as you give us the appropriate credit. All the activities and tools are in H5P format, which is compatible with most learning management and web content management systems, and educators can download whichever resources they want after registering their details on the site.
RN: Some educators will want to use the website fairly passively – as something they can easily steer their students toward. But we hope that many will want to use it more actively, for example by building the resources directly into courses, and programmes, and using them as the foundation for classroom activities and conversations. And we’re already hearing from educators about ways they plan to use the resources that we hadn’t foreseen, and in educational CPD contexts beyond those we’d originally imagined, which is really cool. I hope people will get in touch to let us know how they use Feedback emPower Tools, and how it works out!
CKT: Looking ahead, how do you see Feedback emPower Tools evolving? Are there features that you’d like to develop?
RN: Yes! At the moment, the site covers 18 different kinds of challenges of engaging with feedback, each of which we chose based on the research literature and the many conversations we’ve had about this topic. But we know this isn’t an exhaustive list, and in time we imagine adding new sections to the site that cover more kinds of challenge. We have a couple of ideas in mind already (but we need a good rest first before getting back to work on them!), and we’d be open to hearing recommendations.
RN: We also recognise that although each area of the site contains one activity and one tool, these resources are not exhaustive: there are likely many other useful ways of working on those specific challenges of using feedback. Over time we might design and add extra activities and/or tools to some of the existing pages. That said, what we’d love to happen is that educators see these resources, and think “Actually, that’s quite simple, and it gives me an idea of something else I could do for my students!” In other words, we’d certainly love students and educators to engage with our resources, but we’d also love educators to use our site as a springboard for inspiring their own creative ideas in a similar vein.
CKT: Thanks so much, Rob, for walking us through the rationale of Feedback emPower Tools and giving our readers an idea on how to best use this rich resource. I will definitely use it in my own teaching, but also share it with colleagues in Higher Education and schools. I particularly agree with you when you said that this resource offers the scaffolding that can enable students to take their feedback to the next level, but also provides educators with concrete tools to support their students on this journey.
(cover image by Dr Rob Nash, Prof Naomi Winstone, and Dr Kieran Balloo; shared here with permission)
References
Winstone, N. E., Nash, R. A., Rowntree, J., & Parker, M. (2017). ‘It’d be useful, but I wouldn’t use it’: Barriers to university students’ feedback seeking and recipience. Studies in Higher Education, 42, 2026-2041.
Winstone, N. E., Nash, R. A., Parker, M., & Rowntree, J. (2017). Supporting learners’ agentic engagement with feedback: A systematic review and a taxonomy of recipience processes. Educational Psychologist, 52, 17-37.
Winstone, N. E., & Nash, R. A. (2023). Toward a cohesive psychological science of effective feedback. Educational Psychologist, 58, 111-129.
