Feedback is one of the most effective teaching and learning strategies and has an

immediate impact on learning progress. High-quality feedback is specific and ongoing.

Student engagement with, and ownership of, assessment feedback is critical if students
are to be the authors of their own assessment careers for life. Higher education (HE)
should be supporting students to develop essential assessment feedback skills, if they
are to be able to make sense of, and contribute effectively to, increasingly complex
contexts brought about by the integration of physical, digital, and biological worlds as
part of fourth industrial age requirements (Baker, 2016; McGinnis, 2018). Here we
highlight the importance of an integrated theoretical approach in seeking to better
understand and develop students’ regulation of assessment feedback from cognitive,
metacognitive, and affective perspectives, leading the field in bringing together
multiple theoretical concepts implicated in assessment feedback skills to enhance
understanding of the mechanisms involved and emphasize the need for an
interdisciplinary approach in moving the field forward. The Role of Students in the
Assessment Feedback Process
In considering student assessment feedback skills, we are concerned with how students
(and lecturers) navigate the assessment feedback landscape to maximize their
understanding of assessment feedback, their engagement with it, and success in it, in
relation to immediate and longer-term goals. Assessment feedback has multiple
interpretations. Evans’s definition includes self-feedback, and the mechanisms involved
in internalizing and making sense of feedback for oneself: “all feedback
exchanges generated within assessment design, occurring within and beyond the
immediate learning context, being overt or covert (actively and/or passively sought
and/or received) and, importantly, drawing from a range of sources” (Evans, 2013, p.
71).
Assessment feedback skills involve internal and external self-regulatory processes. A
holistic perspective and understanding of the integrated nature of assessment are
required if learners are to be able to self-assess their performance. Learners need to
have a good understanding of what constitutes good assessment feedback, be able to
manage their cognitions and emotions, be discerning in their use of feedback, and have
the necessary arsenal of strategies to deploy (Carless & Boud, 2018; Evans, 2016).
Importantly, it is about knowing what self-regulatory strategies to use, when, how, and
in what combinations to maximize individual and team effectiveness that HE needs to
be cultivating in students and lecturers (Dinsmore, 2017). Students’ selective and
discriminatory use of resources (internal and external) has a significant impact on their
success in HE (Schneider & Preckel, 2017), and it is these self-regulatory skills sets we
should be developing. Dinsmore (2017) emphasizes the importance of focusing on the
development of higher-level metacognitive actions that enable one to evaluate the
quality and appropriateness of assessment feedback strategies being used.
Table 1 highlights the metacognitive skills students need to manage assessment
feedback effectively; they are linked to self-regulation stages from accurate task
identification and plan activation to evaluation of progress and reflection on
performance.
An essay should have a single clear central idea. Each paragraph should have a clear
main point or topic sentence. Each paragraph should support or expand the central
idea of the paper. The idea of each paragraph should be explained and illustrated
through examples, details, and descriptions.