Discussing feedback with your personal tutees

Guidance on how to engage your personal tutees with their assessment feedback.

 As personal tutor you're in a good position to help your students understand the feedback they have been given and, importantly, how they can feed this forward into subsequent pieces of work.

This might be in an individual meeting or you might invite tutees to share insights from their feedback in a group meeting –facilitating peer dialogue and co-learning.

Remind them where to find their feedback (e.g. MyFeedback in Moodle). You may find it helpful to use some of the guiding questions below. 

 Guiding questions

• Is feedback only given in writing?
• Have you had any informal feedback on your work, including contributions to discussions, seminars, labs? What did you learn?
• Have you had any formal feedback yet on your work? If so, what have you learned and what actions will you take forward as you continue to study?
• What strengths did the feedback identify in your work?
• What areas of improvement were highlighted?
• What might you do differently next time?
• What kind of feedback do you find most useful?
• Are you making use of other opportunities to seek feedback e.g. via Moodle or during office hours?
• How confident do you feel about using the correct referencing style for your subject(s)?
• Are you confident that you understand what plagiarism is and how to avoid it?

Feed forward

Sometimes students do not realise they are getting or have received feedback. We can change this by encouraging tutees to think about what feedback is and how to use it for their next assignment or assessment as part of an ongoing action plan.

Take a look at Section 8 of the Academic Manual or browse our other Assessment and Feedback Teaching Toolkits for a refresher on the different forms of assessment feedback.

Student guide to feedback

A UCL ChangeMakers project also produced a guide, 5 steps to making the most out of feedback, which may be useful for your tutees.

You might suggest they work through the guide’s steps before bringing a piece of feedback to discuss with you.

More personal tutoring resources

View more resources to help you carry out your role as a personal tutor.

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This guide has been produced by the UCL Arena Centre for Research-based Education. You are welcome to use this guide if you are from another educational facility, but you must credit the UCL Arena Centre.