Feedback on your assignments is a KEY to your learning.

Your lecturers expect you to read their comments carefully and apply the ideas to future work. Although these comments may help explain the mark you got, this is not their primary purpose.

Module assignments are designed to develop key skills and knowledge, and this doesn’t stop when you get your marks.

The comments and feedback on your assignments are an important part of your education, because they will help you improve your work and make better choices in your future assignments in this module and many others.

While your lecturers and seminar leaders will tend to focus on how you performed on this particular piece of work, their specific comments will also correspond to general guidance regarding your future improvement in the field— including your mastery of analytical and critical thinking skills, your ability to make an argument or analyse data, and specific writing strengths and weaknesses.

You’ll use your feedback on the CLAS Feedback Cover Sheet (see below) for each assignment that you submit to Turnitin. This guidance will help you fill it in.

How to Make Best Use of Feedback

Feedback will appear on the assessments you submit on Moodle as comment bubbles, coloured text within the paper, or as summary comments highlighting strengths and areas for improvement. You can print/save a .pdf version of the annotated paper, with all the comment bubbles copied in as end notes.

Sometimes seeing the reviewed paper can feel overwhelming or discouraging. To overcome doubt and make best use of it, follow these tips:

Prepare. Looking at feedback (even when it is constructive) requires calm. Before opening the comments, tell yourself two things:

• I am not my writing. Although writing is often an intimate act—especially when you discuss your own experiences, values, and goals—it is separate from you as a person. A criticism of your writing is not a criticism of you!
• Feedback is part of learning. To become an effective communicator and scholarly writer, you must hear from your audience, in this case your instructor. Don’t be intimidated! Your lecturers give feedback to help you improve, so they often focus on those aspects that need improvement. This can be hard to read at first because it seems like they’re only saying negative things, when in fact, they’re working hard to pick out those areas where you can make improvements.

Scan. Quickly read through all the comments to see their breadth. Don’t just look at the mark, but do not linger on the comments, either; just scan and absorb. What stands out to you?

Walk. Put the paper away—either by closing the file or placing the paper in a drawer. Do something else, preferably active. You could go for a walk, practice yoga, or clean. During this time, reflect on what you just saw.

Read the feedback carefully. First you should look through the “General Comments on your Grademark Report, which are appended at the end of your assignment when you print/save a .pdf of your assignment from Moodle. These will note strengths and areas for improvement.

Then, look through your assignment itself and identify the points of connection between those general comments, your lecturer’s further comments on the body of your work (helpfully collated after the general comments as end notes, linking to specific locations on in your work itself).

Ask. Take charge of your education! You can’t benefit from feedback that you don’t understand, so ask for clarification when you need it. Remember your lecturer gave you the feedback because they genuinelywanted to convey information to you that will improve your writing. They wouldn’t want you to be confused and will be happy to explain their comments further if you ask.

Note. Keep a record of the comments your lecturers make and compare them with feedback you’ve received earlier in the term or in different modules. This provides insight into which disciplinary skills you have mastered, and where you still need to improve. These notes can often form a good basis for a discussion with your lecturer during office hours.

Prioritize. You will not be able to perfect every aspect of writing in one revision. Therefore, you will need to prioritize, choosing the most important or relevant skills to work on first. For example:

• Order the comments from the most important to the least important. Often the reviewer will let you know what the top areas for improvement are in their general comments. Choose the top two or three to work on first.
• Start with global improvements. These global improvements are the bigger concerns in your paper: idea development, analysis, argument construction and paper organisation (including introductions and conclusions). You can work on the smaller grammar, sentence, and style tweaks later (and make sure you use grammar and spell check!).

Reflect. Once you have gone through the feedback and talked with your lecturer or seminar leader, you should step back and reflect on what you’ve learned.

Feedback to Improve Your Learning Strategies

• Reflect on specifics, but don’t look at individual bits of feedback such as “This paper was badly organized” as evidence that you always organize ideas poorly. Use such comments to ask yourself what aspect of the learning process led you to a disorganized paper? What kinds of assignments do you have organization problems with? What kinds of organization problems are they? What kinds of feedback have you received about organization in the past? What can you do to resolve these issues, not just for one paper, but for all your papers? SLAS 1-to-1 meetings can help you with this process.
• Reflect on your larger aims. Ask yourself more general questions like what are my goals in this module and in my degree programme? What progress is being made toward the goal? What activities do I need to do to make better progress?

Strategy-oriented thinking will help you go from being a student who stumbles from assignment to assignment hoping for the best to being a student who understands the processes and skills you are developing. You will find that these things become easier and more natural over time.

What do I do with the Feedback Coversheet?

The CLAS Feedback Coversheet is designed to help you engage with your feedback in the ways set out above.

Download the template (below) to your desktop/cloud drive and use it for every assignment you submit on Turnitin.

As a TEMPLATE, each time you open it, a new document will be opened. This means you never have the problem of writing over another essay.

To Use the Template

First Assignment: In the box at the top of the Template describe what went well and what you found challenging when completing this assignment. You might, for example, write about how you struggled to organise the paragraphs or how you found analysing the primary source much easier once we’d had a discussion in seminar. Try to identify 2-3 things to put in the box.

In the second box, identify what strategies you used that were helpful in completing your assignment and what you might do differently next time. For example, you may have found your study group really useful for understanding the scholarly literature, but not have left yourself enough time to proofread or revise your draft, so next time you’ll set yourself a deadline 24 hours before the paper is due.

Subsequent Assignments: Print/save a .pdf copy of your first assignment from Moodle by clicking on the cog wheel, selecting the down arrow button, and selecting “current view” from the options. This will save your paper, with all your marker’s comments and make it easy to read. Scroll to the bottom of your essay where you will find your “GradeMark Report”. Copy and paste the “General Comments” into the top box on your second assignment’s coversheet.

In the second box, list 3-5 things you will do as you write your second assignment to respond to that feedback and make improvements in your thinking or writing. A couple of bullet points is fine but do put some thought into this. The more effort you put in, the better the result will be. This self-reflective work is essential to your learning (see below about categories of feedback).

If you do not submit the coversheet, your mark for the assignment will be withheld until your coversheet has been submitted.

Categories of Feedback

Feedback usually falls into three categories, which you can use to organise your notes about the feedback you receive.

Feedback About a Task or Product

Usually this can be identified by comments about how to acquire more, different, or correct information, such as “You need to include more about the Melian Dialogue” or “Evidence missing”, “Word choice error”. This kind of feedback is usually the easiest to fix because it is about your knowledge or how you are writing.

N.B. Your writing can easily be improved by making full use of the spell check and grammar check built in to your word processor, like Microsoft Word. The less commenting we have to do on grammar, formatting, or spelling, the more commenting we can do on your analysis, interpretation, or idea, which is where the real improvements in your writing can come.

These kinds of comments can also be the hardest to extrapolate from (after all, the next paper you write might not be about Thucydides!), but there are general lessons to learn about how you deploy the knowledge and evidence that you have. Use this kind of feedback to help you think about how you search for evidence, use it, and strategize the writing and layout of your next assignment.

Feedback About a Process Used to Create a Product or Complete a Task

Comments like “This transition is weak” or “Your analysis needs to be more nuanced” or “more analysis needed”. Sometimes your lecturer may question your interpretation or offer a counter-argument to your position. If this happens you should be flattered not offended! Such attention to your process of analysis is a mark of how seriously your lecturer is engaging with your ideas.

These kinds of comments are more easily applicable to the next assignment because they focus directly on the process that you have used. Most of your lecturers want to focus their attention on these kinds of comments so we can help you refine or clarify your purpose or meaning, the organization of the piece, and the logic of your argument.

Take special note of this feedback; it will help guide you in the self-reflection that is such an important part of receiving feedback. Lecturers won’t necessarily keep repeating the same comment over and over, so if you see something like this once, it should signal to you that you will need to pay closer attention to how you complete the process of your assignment in the future.

These kinds of comments are a good discussion point when meeting for a a 1-to-1 appointment with a writing tutor in the Student Learning and Advisor Service (SLAS). They are also easy comments to follow up on immediately, since they are often focused on the processes of interpretation and engagement with sources. You can practice improving the skills related to process questions when you are doing your reading or preparing for seminars.

Feedback About Self-evaluation or Confidence to Engage Further on a Task

For example, “You already know the key features of the opening of an argument. Check to see whether you have incorporated them in your first paragraph.” This kind of feedback usually comes later in term once you have submitted a second piece of work.

This feedback is important because your lecturer is trying to help you see where you have made improvements and how you can fine tune your learning. It’s also valuable because it allows you to see the progress you’re making.