This article is the first in a short Digital Learning series exploring one of the most persistent challenges in higher education. It was written by Ghizzi Dunlop, Digital Learning Designer for the College of Health, Science and Society (CHSS) and Marieke Guy, Digital Learning Manager for CHSS.
A question for you to consider: How do we support students to engage with feedback in ways that actually change what they do next time?
Improving assessment feedback engagement sits at the intersection of:
- pedagogy and assessment design
- student skills and confidence
- digital systems and institutional processes
Across the series we will surface some shared problems and assumptions directly from UWE which will allow us to explore evidence-informed ways of thinking about feedback. We will also showcase small, testable changes, some of these will include ideas from Blackboard Ultra and invite colleagues to contribute experiences and counter‑examples.
This first article focuses on context and framing: why feedback engagement remains difficult, how current institutional initiatives help, and why awareness alone is rarely enough.
The problem
Conversations with academic colleagues across disciplines suggest a familiar pattern:
In a recent discussion with Hazel Cottle (Senior Lecturer in Occupational Therapy, who is working on the undergraduate Occupational Therapy programme and Occupational Therapy apprenticeships at UWE) we heard an example of this pattern. Hazel described a standard multi‑page feedback form used across assessment types. Students typically recognise the grade, sometimes scan the comments, and rarely engage with the final reflective section intended to support improvement.
This isn’t because staff aren’t providing feedback, it’s because the conditions for using it as a student are weak. We will be hearing more from Hazel later in the series.
A wider institutional focus: improving awareness of feedback
This work sits within a broader university-wide effort to improve assessment and feedback, including an initiative focused on improving student awareness at the point of marks release (internal link).
This initiative encourages module leaders to send targeted messages to students whose marks have been posted, to clearly highlight that feedback is available, how to find it, and why it matters. Reports show that the guide on how to access the feedback has had a high rate of engagement, which could show that feedback is initially difficult to find on our system. The next step with this intervention is to analyse whether the modules that were sent the guide also had a higher engagement rate with the feedback.
This is an important and intervention that recognises a simple truth – students can’t engage with feedback they don’t realise is there. However, awareness is just the first step.
Why awareness alone isn’t enough
Even when students know feedback is available, several barriers are still there:
- Feedback arrives after the student’s energy has shifted to the next activity (task, module, assessment)
- Students may not understand how to interpret or prioritise comments
- Feedback often feels disconnected from future assessments
- Lengthy or technical feedback can feel overwhelming
- There is rarely a prompt or structure that supports follow-through
This aligns with a substantial body of assessment research that shows feedback is highly variable in impact not because it lacks quality, but because students’ capacity to use it is uneven.
The pedagogy: feedback literacy and self-regulation
Rather than seeing feedback as something staff deliver, research increasingly frames it as something students must learn to use. Current feedback literacy thinking positions students as active, agentic participants in feedback processes (e.g. Naomi Winstone’s work), defines feedback literacy as the capacities to interpret and use feedback effectively (David Carless & David Boud, 2018), and frames feedback as curriculum design rather than mere transmission. Recent work has built on these ideas with empirical measurement of learner feedback behaviours, discipline-specific and cross-cultural studies, and exploration of technology-mediated and AI-supported feedback environments that deepen the original frameworks.
Three ideas are particularly helpful here:
From this viewpoint, the question shifts from “Did students read the feedback?” to “Did our design help students do something with it?”
This is a learning design question
Seen this way, feedback engagement is not about student motivation, compliance and reminding students more.
It’s about designing environments, prompts, and structures that make engaging with feedback easy, worthwhile, timely and connected to future learning
This is where digital tools, learning design, and pedagogy connect.
Points for reflection
Before we move into tools and techniques, we’d like you to consider:
- Where do you see students dropping off in the feedback process?
- What assumptions do we make about students’ ability to use feedback?
- What feels hardest to change: timing, format, culture, or workload?
If you have comments and reflections you can share them on our UWE Bristol – Digital Learning LinkedIn site.
In Part 2, we’ll explore practical, low-effort design patterns: including Blackboard Ultra approaches, that aim to move from awareness → engagement → action.