Giving Feedback
May 2026
What?
Effective feedback is central to student learning and serves to deepen student understanding, guide improvement, assess learning, and promote student agency in their own learning (e.g., self-regulated learning). There are two primary forms of feedback:
- Formative feedback: Provides ongoing, low-stakes input on performance during the learning process to help students identify learning gaps and improve their work.
- Summative feedback: Evaluates learning at a particular point in time, often for grading or accountability purposes.
Both instructors and students play essential roles, whether the feedback is formative or summative. Effective feedback should be specific, timely, aligned with learning objectives, and deliver actionable information in a supportive tone. It should also create opportunities for dialogue, student reflection, and revision (Ambrose et al., 2010; Nicol & Macfarlane-Dick, 2006). Students also play an active role by engaging with feedback, reflecting on it, and applying it to their future work.
This teaching guide provides strategies for effectively delivering formative and summative feedback in a variety of modalities, describes how to support students’ productive engagement with feedback, and highlights how these approaches can be used purposefully to enhance student learning.
Why?
While instructors invest considerable time designing assignments and assessments, that effort only pays off if students understand what they did well and how they can improve. Feedback makes that understanding possible. More than just evaluating performance, feedback shapes how students learn, think, what they understand, and how they approach future work.
Across disciplines, feedback is most effective when it is treated as a collaborative process and not as a one-way transmission of information from instructor to student. As noted by Winstone and Carless (2019), students are actively involved in “meaning-making” through interactions with their instructors and peers (p. 12). The value lies not just in the comments themselves, but in what students do with them. When students can connect feedback to what they already know and feel motivated to act on these comments, they are better equipped to close the gap between their current performance and course learning goals.
Formative assessments play a key role in this process. They provide students with structured opportunities to demonstrate their understanding and learn where their progress stands relative to course expectations. When used strategically throughout a course (such as in the mid-term), low-stakes opportunities to receive, process, and apply feedback allow students to refine their thinking before high-stakes evaluations. This benefits both students, who gain a clearer picture of their progress, and instructors, who can identify and address gaps in understanding before they widen. Research has shown that frequent, low-stakes formative assessments tied to constructive feedback produced measurable gains in student performance, regardless of discipline (Morris et al., 2021).
Timing and specificity also determine feedback’s effectiveness. Feedback is most useful when it arrives promptly after an assignment so students can apply the comments in real time. This is especially important in ten-week quarters. Additionally, vague responses such as “good analysis” or “needs more depth” do not give students a clear path forward. Specific feedback that names particular strengths, identifies precise gaps, and connects directly to stated learning outcomes gives students a concrete basis for improving both their work and their thinking (Winstone et al., 2017).
Feedback is also a tool for promoting equity. Clearly articulated criteria, transparent rubrics, and structured opportunities to reflect and revise work helps ensure that all students — not just those already familiar with academic expectations — can understand and act on feedback. Developing feedback literacy is critical because students’ experiences of knowing how to use feedback effectively vary (Winstone & Carless, 2019). Feedback literacy, or the ability to understand, interpret, and apply feedback to enhance learning can be fostered by using a feedback loop (Little et al., 2024; Winstone & Carless, 2019; Carless & Boud, 2018). This loop should include learning to…
- Appreciate feedback processes
- Make judgments about the quality of work
- Manage emotional responses to feedback
- Take meaningful action.
When instructors treat these capacities as skills to be taught rather than qualities students either have or lack, feedback becomes a more equitable practice. Understood this way, feedback is both a mechanism for improving a paper or a problem set, and how students learn to take ownership of their own learning.
How?
Black et al. (2004) write that “To be effective, feedback should cause thinking to take place” (p. 14). The strategies below aim to support instructors in providing students with growth-oriented feedback, as well as fostering a learning environment where students actively engage with and apply feedback.
If you’re working as part of an instructional team — e.g., with Teaching Assistants (TAs) or readers — align early on the kind of feedback you would like to provide and identify efficient ways to deliver it. Whether you are teaching a large lecture course or a small seminar, this guide provides actionable strategies to help give meaningful feedback to your students. For more on how to teach effectively with TAs, see our Short Guide to Teaching with TAs teaching resource.
Getting Started: Giving Effective Feedback
Foster a class culture where feedback is valued
To help students learn how to receive and engage well with feedback, you can foster a class culture that intentionally positions feedback as an expected, collaborative part of learning. Drawing on growth mindset research (Dweck, 2006), you can model openness by inviting students into dialogue about feedback and framing mistakes as growth opportunities. Examples include:
- Create regular opportunities for low-stakes formative feedback (e.g., ungraded practice opportunities or low-point assignments).
- Build time into your course (synchronously or asynchronously) for students to reflect on feedback and/or make changes from feedback.
- Stage providing feedback. Offer comments first, have them reflect, and then provide scores (Black et al., 2004).
- Establish clear learning goals and success criteria to help students understand feedback’s purpose and how it supports improvement. Show how the goals are directly connected to the course learning outcomes.
- Explicitly model and explain to students how to receive and use feedback through personal stories, feedback examples, and/or videos.
Recognize the type of feedback that will support student learning goals
Align your feedback to your student learning objectives and prioritize what matters most. Common feedback types include (Leibold and Schwarz, 2015; Alvarez, Espasa, & Guasch, 2011):
- Corrective feedback, which identifies successes and errors.
- Epistemic feedback, which poses questions to prompt deeper thinking, further elaboration, explanation, or clarification.
- Suggestive feedback, which offers recommendations and ideas for expanding or improving.
- Epistemic and suggestive feedback, which poses questions and suggestions for improvement.
Corrective feedback can help students recognize their progress towards learning goals, understand what they did well, and identify errors. However, a combination of epistemic and suggestive feedback can lead to deeper and more constructive engagement on the part of the student (Alvarez, Espasa, & Guasch, 2011).
You can also reflect on the distinction between formative and summative feedback. Recognize how you can make space for both these types in your classroom and involve students in the process by incorporating peer-led and self-assessment, which you can guide by providing examples of student work as well as rubrics to guide students’ evaluation process.
Reserve comprehensive written feedback for major summative assignments
Individualized written feedback can be helpful, but it’s also time-consuming for instructors. Reserve comprehensive and individualized written feedback for assessments that require higher-order thinking or ask students to synthesize their learning, such as research projects, essays, or presentations.
Keep marginal comments to a minimum to ensure your feedback is digestible. Additionally, provide a brief, global note summarizing the one or two most important takeaways that can “feedforward” into the student’s future work. You can also refer to what you know about the student’s context, including their expressed goals, previous work, or any office hour conversations you’ve had.
If speaking comes more easily than writing, consider using voice-to-text tools to assist you when drafting comments. You can also build a comment library of responses in the Bruin Learn SpeedGrader or on a separate document you can copy and paste from.
Be aware of tone and word choice
Tone and word choice influence whether students engage with feedback or become defensive and discouraged. Effective feedback is specific, clearly phrased, and grounded in concrete examples from student work. The Student Experience Project’s Wise Feedback model offers a practical framework for striking that balance.
Wise Feedback structures critical comments in a way that builds student trust by communicating two things:
- The instructor intends to support growth.
- The feedback reflects an honest assessment rather than bias or negative stereotyping.
In practice, this takes the form of a brief framing statement included alongside comments on key assignments or exams, conveying that the instructor holds high standards and believes the student is capable of meeting them. Research shows that Wise Feedback increases students’ trust in the impartiality of grading, improves academic engagement, and reduces outcome gaps between students from structurally disadvantaged and advantaged racial groups (Cohen, Steele, & Ross, 1999).
Wise Feedback statements do not need to be lengthy, as long as they acknowledge student effort, communicate concrete ways to improve the work, and convey your belief in their ability to improve. Feedback framed this way helps instill a growth mindset in students by conveying that ability is not fixed, and improvement is always within reach. See the example below:
“You’ve done a great job applying the formula, but let’s take it a step further. Try to explain why this formula works in this context and how it connects to the broader theory. I’m confident you can make these connections and deepen your understanding.”
Vary the modalities through which you provide feedback
Instead of typing out all of your comments, save time by recording audio comments for some assignments. Research suggests that audio feedback can motivate students and feels more personal than written feedback (Rockinson-Szapkiw, 2012); that learners are more likely to open audio feedback (Lunt & Curran, 2010); and that a combination of audio and written feedback fosters more cognitive development and instructional satisfaction than written feedback alone (Rockinson-Szapkiw, 2012). To add a non-verbal dimension to your communication, you can also opt for recorded video feedback (though that may require more performance energy on your part). You can also consider places where you can provide automated feedback. On Bruin Learn, online quizzes composed of multiple choice, multiple selection, true or false, or fill-in-the-blank questions may be graded automatically. Creating some assignments that can be automatically graded provides a way for students to receive input about their performance with minimal instructor effort. Peruse UCLA Humanities Technology’s (HumTech) page on Bruin Learn quizzes to learn more about building a quiz in Bruin Learn.
Vary the scale at which you provide feedback
Supplement individual feedback with small-group and whole-class feedback. For example, rather than meeting students one-on-one in office hours, consider inviting students to attend in small groups in preparation for major assessments or as a mid-quarter check-in. You might ask students to work together to prepare an agenda for the group meeting, with questions and points for clarification or elaboration. If you are facilitating group work in class and the space of the room is accessible to move through, you can stop by individual groups to check on their progress and offer help.
If you sense common misconceptions or pain points — or common causes for celebration in your students’ learning journeys — you can also give whole-class feedback, either in person or online by leveraging the Bruin Learn announcements feature to disseminate a written, audio, or video comment. Refer to HumTech’s resource on Bruin Learn announcements for step-by-step instructions on using this feature.
You can also leverage polling technologies such as iClicker or PollEverywhere to gather anonymous student responses and provide quick, generalized formative feedback based on the trends you see in responses. See the TLC’s In-Class Polling Comparison Guide to review options for facilitating this.
Nurture feedback literacy
Feedback literacy is “the understandings, capacities and dispositions” needed for a person to understand received information and apply it to improve their learning strategies or work (Carless & Boud, 2018, p. 1315). Students do not automatically know how to give and receive feedback — be explicit with your class that these tasks require skills that take practice to build.
You can also encourage students by sharing your own experiences with processing and using feedback to model the reflective practice that students need to build feedback literacy. In short, help students recognize feedback as an ongoing conversation in which they have agency and “shared responsibility” (Xie & Liu, 2024, p. 8).
The diagram below illustrates a conversational feedback loop where the instructor creates student learning objectives; delivers instruction and assessment; provides students with feedback; processes feedback with students; assesses their progress towards the learning objectives; and, finally, repeats the cycle with new learning objectives that are informed by the students’ progress.
Additionally, you can break down the goal of “feedback literacy” into components that students can recognize and seek to work towards. Molloy et al. (2020) put forth four components constitutive of feedback literacy:
- Appreciating feedback.
- Making judgments.
- Managing emotions.
- Taking action.
As you plan to foster student feedback literacy, consider what steps you can take to address each of these components. Steps might include:
- Facilitating a classroom culture where feedback is valued (refer to the above section on this topic), to help students appreciate feedback.
- Asking students to reflect on received feedback and identify their most important takeaways or action items to support them in making judgments and taking action.
- Inviting students to give you feedback on your feedback (answering questions such as, “What, if any, of my feedback did you find confusing or discouraging?”), to humanize the process of assessment and signal that you care about students’ affective experiences of your feedback.
Moving Forward: Reflect on Your Feedback Experiences
Reflect on your experiences giving and receiving feedback. What kind of feedback has been encouraging for you in the past? What feedback has been less so? How are you used to giving and receiving feedback?
Reflect on how your students have responded to your feedback in the past. If you want to make changes, consider incorporating a different feedback modality into your process next time. Remember that teaching is an iterative process. If you tried a new approach this time that didn’t go as planned, you can always tweak or try something else next term.
Citing this Guide
Teaching and Learning Center (TLC). (2026). Giving Feedback. Teaching and Learning Center at the University of California, Los Angeles. Retrieved [today’s date].
References
Alvarez, I., Espasa, A., & Guasch, T. (2012). The value of feedback in improving collaborative writing assignments in an online learning environment. Studies in Higher Education, 37(4), 387–400. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2010.510182
Ambrose, S.A., Bridges, M.W., DiPietro, M., Lovett, M.C., & Norman, M.K. (2010). How learning works: Seven research-based principles for smart teaching. Jossey-Bass.
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Carless, D., & Boud, D. (2018). The development of student feedback literacy: Enabling uptake of feedback. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 43(8), 1315–1325. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2018.1463354
Cohen, G. L., Steele, C. M., & Ross, L. D. (1999). The mentor’s dilemma: Providing critical feedback across the racial divide. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 25(10), 1302–1318. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167299258011
Leibold, N., & Schwarz, L. M. (2015). The Art of Giving Online Feedback. Journal of Effective Teaching, 15(1), 34–46. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1060438
Little, T., Dawson, P., Boud, D., & Tai, J. (2024). Can students’ feedback literacy be improved? A scoping review of interventions. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 49(1), 39–52. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2023.2177613
Lunt, T., & Curran, J. (2010). ‘Are you listening please?’ The advantages of electronic audio feedback compared to written feedback. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 35(7), 759–769. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602930902977772
Molloy, E., Boud, D., & Henderson, M. (2020). Developing a learning-centred framework for feedback literacy. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 45(4), 527–540. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2019.1667955
Morris, R., Perry, T., & Wardle, L. (2021). Formative assessment and feedback for learning in higher education: A systematic review. Review of Education, 9(3), e3292. https://doi.org/10.1002/rev3.3292
Nicol, D., & McCallum, S. (2022). Making internal feedback explicit: Exploiting the multiple comparisons that occur during peer review. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 47(3), 424–443. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2021.1924620
Rockinson-Szapkiw, A. (2012). Should Online Doctoral Instructors Adopt Audio Feedback as an Instructional Strategy? Preliminary Evidence. International Journal of Doctoral Studies, 7, 245–258. https://doi.org/10.28945/1595
Winstone, N. E., & Carless, D. (2019). Designing effective feedback processes in higher education: A learning-focused approach. Routledge.
Winstone, N. E., Nash, R. A., Parker, M., & Rowntree, J. (2017). Supporting learners’ agentic engagement with feedback: A systematic review and a taxonomy of recipience processes. Educational Psychologist, 52(1), 17–37. https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520.2016.1207538
Xie, Z., & Liu, W. (2024). What matters in the cultivation of student feedback literacy: Exploring university EFL teachers’ perceptions and practices. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 11(1), 162. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-02648-8