Designing opportunities for students to proactively seek out and generate feedback

Barriers to students’ active use of feedback are well established in the literature. Therefore, in this chapter we provide practical research-informed recommendations for how educators might create and embed opportunities for students to proactively seek out and generate feedback. Informed by sociomaterial theories, which acknowledge the social and material contexts in which learning takes place, we firstly focus on different sources of feedback information, including: the ‘self’ and ‘disciplinary colleagues’, who can provide evaluative and directive feedback information; and ‘knowledge/service users or audiences’ and ‘objects’, that can provide consequential feedback information (i.e. responses to an action that tell the learner about the effectiveness of that action). We then examine how these sources may be incorporated across different timescales, from the short-term everyday ‘rhythms’ of a discipline, to ‘cycles’ of feedback loops and longer-term ‘spirals’ of learning. We ultimately aim to illuminate ways of fostering greater student responsibility in feedback processes.