Four feed-forward principles enhance students' perception of feedback as meaningful

This paper analyses the outcome of an international study examining student perceptions of feedback. Our initial work built on research by Gibbs which identified linkages between current and subsequent course activities as a critical factor in whether students value the feedback they receive. Drawing on the work of Gibbs on feedback and Biggs on constructive alignment we proposed four principles for achieving student relevant course feedback. Using these principles we analysed the curricula and learning activities of two similar IT courses taught in Australia and Sweden, and contrasted this with student perceptions of the quality of feedback they received. That analysis demonstrated that the learning activities and assessment practices currently in place violated all four principles to a significant degree. Students were also quite unhappy with these courses and did not rate feedback highly. We hypothesised a causal relationship between adherence to the principles we had proposed and student's perceptions of feedback as meaningful and useful. In the present work we report on the results obtained by making changes to the learning activities and assessment practices in the two courses to better align them with the four principles. These results show significant improvement in student satisfaction and attitudes to feedback in course evaluation questionnaires. We conclude that our hypothesis is confirmed and that changing course learning activities to align with the principles we propose improves the student learning experience.