Making the Most of Feedback

Writing is part of learning. We’ve found that students have the tendency to treat each assignment as a discrete experience, instead of thinking reflectively about how their skills are developing over the course of their studies. This chapter will encourage you to think carefully about the feedback you receive on your written work, and how you can use it to shape your next assignment and develop as a writer. By the time you have completed and submitted a piece of coursework, it can be difficult to be objective about your work. You’ve spent a lot of time researching this subject and planning and writing the assignment. As a result, you are very close to the topic. You are also likely to be very focused on what grade you are going to achieve, and what kind of feedback you might receive. When you get your assignments back, it can be tempting to simply look at the grade, read over the written feedback, and then set it aside before moving on to the next piece of coursework. However, feedback is a valuable way for you to develop your skills and improve your grades at every stage in academic life, from first-year undergraduate level to PhD studies and professional academic life. While we find that students are often keen to read the feedback on their assignments as soon as they get it back, we also find that students can often have a tendency to view each assignment in isolation, failing to recognise that the feedback they receive on one report can be useful for other pieces of work too.