Library Subject Guides
At various times in our lives we will receive requests to provide feedback about our experiences. Perhaps it's a holiday we've been on or a service we've used. Here at the University, as students we'll be asked to fill out module evaluations or student surveys; as staff there'll be staff surveys and all manner of other times when our feedback will be sought. These feedback requests will usually ask for both score-based feedback and written comments. In this section we’ll focus on examples of written feedback.
Inevitably, we want our feedback to be effective — to be considered and acted upon. And like a lot of things in life there are ways we can give feedback that are more effective than others. Let's look at how to write comments that can be used constructively to make the changes we seek…
Think about some of the best feedback you've received in life — maybe it's feedback from an academic assignment, or suggestions given after a job interview. When feedback works best, it allows you to reflect on what you’re doing well and areas that you need to improve for next time.
That’s equally true of the feedback you provide through surveys — usually the people running the survey want to be able to use your comments to understand what’s been most effective about your experience (and to keep doing it) and to hear about areas which might need to be addressed to provide a better experience in the future.
To put this into context, let's consider the specific example of a module evaluation survey for students. In this example, constructive feedback would help the University to…
There’s no prescribed approach or exacting method to giving feedback, but below we’ve suggested some of the hallmarks of what you could aim for in your written comments. In each case we’ve given an example of a more and a less helpful comment, continuing with the student survey example we explored above. Take a look at these suggestions to see how you could write your own comments in a similar way…
People are more likely to help you if you're polite to them, and this extends to feedback — the person reading your comments is much more likely to act on them if they’re written in a friendly manner. You might be angry about something but if you're just hostile in your comment then the reader will likely get defensive — they might even be personally affected by the comments. Making people cry is not often a great motivator! As such, it's usually much more effective to reframe your frustration in a respectful and considerate tone; a good rule of thumb is to write feedback in the way you would like to receive it.
The guest lecturer’s teaching style was awful!
I found it more difficult to engage with the guest lecture because the presenter’s teaching style was so different from the rest of the module team.
It's possible for our feelings to be influenced by unconscious biases. We might think of ourselves as considerate and open-minded, but society does have a habit of imposing bad habits upon us. Personal characteristics, including (but not limited to) gender, race, nationality, or accent, can be an influence upon how we perceive people, which in turn may mean we treat them more harshly or more favourably than others — for instance, research shows that women and people belonging to marginalised groups are more likely to be rated negatively in teaching evaluations (for instance, Heffernan, 2021). We need to be vigilant in resisting stereotypes when we're giving feedback, especially when feeding back on individuals. We should therefore focus our opinions on the thing our feedback directly relates to, not personal characteristics.
The lecturer’s accent was so bad, I just gave up listening!
I sometimes struggled to make out what the lecturer was saying during lectures. Maybe they could check the captions on the lecture recordings afterwards to make it easier to catch up?
Your feedback will be much easier to understand and to use if you can be as specific as possible. Try to avoid overly-generalised statements and to add examples which will help to make clear what you mean.
The reading list was poor.
I struggled to use the module reading list as it wasn’t structured very helpfully, especially the readings for week 4.
Honesty is most definitely the best policy in feedback. The person you're feeding back to usually wants genuine, truthful feedback they can work with, not just platitudes you think they want to hear. Of course, you still need to be careful about the tone of your comments (people are still people, after all) but try to give as full and accurate a picture as possible. Some surveys will be anonymous so your comments wouldn’t be attributed to you personally, and that certainly gives a degree of security in situations where it would otherwise be harder to speak your mind. Just because you're anonymous doesn't mean you should be unpleasant, so remember the "courtesy" advice. And it's also generally best to avoid including any names or personal details in your responses.
Everything was fine I suppose.
I enjoyed the module on the whole (especially the opportunities to ask questions), but felt that more time could have been spent looking at practical applications of some of the theories.
It’s tempting, when writing feedback, just to focus on what’s gone before and what you liked or disliked about the experience. But feedback becomes all the more powerful and beneficial if you can also include some suggestions of what you would have preferred! You’re not responsible for coming up with all of the solutions, but some sense of what could've been done differently is very helpful.
There was not enough information about the assessment.
I thought the assessment briefing was helpful but I would have liked to have more time for questions. Maybe next time you could extend that session and give more time to look at some previous examples?
Forthcoming sessions on … :
There's more training events at:
