Sustainable Feedback: Students’ and Tutors’ Perceptions

Feedback has been shown to substantially influence students’ learning. However, not everything characterized as feedback is effective. Sustainable feedback places students in an active role in which they generate and use feedback from peers, self or others and aims at developing lifelong learning skills. First-year higher education students and tutors received sustainable feedback during their problem-based learning. To gain insights into how they perceived the sustainable feedback, students were probed via structured, open-ended questionnaires. While all participants positively valued the feedback, their personal characteristics, previous experience with feedback and concomitant perceptions appeared to have greatly influenced both tutors’ and students’ specific, individual behavior and responses. Conclusion is that sustainable feedback requires an evolving role of students and tutors with respect to sharing their perceptions of what feedback is, understanding the value and importance of feedback contributions of all participants, and developing the necessary skills to ask questions and give feedback.