It’s the end of the semester, and you’re reviewing student feedback surveys. ‘The assignments were unclear.’ ‘We never got any feedback.’ ‘Group work was a waste of time.’ Your heart sinks. You spent countless hours writing assessment instructions, providing feedback, and creating detailed lesson plans with plenty of opportunity for debrief. Where do you start? What should you give your attention to? When should you adapt your teaching based on student comments, and when should you stand firm on teaching principles?
Eliciting the student voice and, more importantly, enacting their feedback supports student agency and helps them to feel included and respected in the learning process. In order to enact the student feedback in time for that specific cohort to feel the benefits, this needs to be done outside of the institution-wide survey usually conducted at the end of the semester. Listening to student feedback allows you to change minor subject aspects, which helps students feel like they have more control over the process. However, sometimes, we receive feedback from students that, if enacted, would lead to bad practices in education.
So, how do you separate valid criticisms from noise? This post offers three criteria for determining whether to implement student feedback.
Is the feedback suitable?
There may be times when enacting student feedback leads to bad practice. As experts in the discipline, It’s important to use your experience and knowledge to guide whether you enact the feedback or determine that it’s not suitable. Courses with group assessment tasks often receive negative feedback due to the student’s experience with their group. This doesn’t mean that we stop doing the group work, but it does indicate that there may be issues in the group process and perhaps the students need a bit more support in the forming stages. If we remove group work altogether, we would be doing the students a disservice as they would not learn the skills they need for future careers. Higher education is an ideal place for students to learn how to communicate and interact with their peers, but this needs to be a scaffolded and supported process.
Before making changes to your course, consider the following:
➼ Does this feedback support solid educational principles?
➼ Would making this change compromise the core of your discipline?
➼ Is this more about student comfort or genuine learning?
Example 1
- Context: The subject is a foundational, entry-level subject in a content-heavy course. The learning outcomes are predominantly lower-order thinking.
- Feedback: The students have mostly commented on disliking the exam: “Exams are not appropriate for students any more because of the high levels of anxiety experienced by students.”
- Action and rationale: The students are correct about anxiety, and support can be implemented to mitigate this risk (practice questions, details about the concepts covered in the exam). However, exams are still valid assessments. As long as the exam has good quality questions (higher-order thinking MCQs with vignettes and short answer questions), it’s not appropriate to get rid of the exam.
Example 2
- Context: A placement subject for primary teaching with multiple written assessment tasks, including an essay.
- Feedback: Student feedback focused on the assessment burden: “Why are we forced to write essays on placement? Can’t we focus on the placement instead of writing disconnected essays?”
- Action and rationale: This feedback highlights inauthentic assessment as the disconnect between the placement and the assessment task is noticeable. The educators should consider more authentic forms of assessment for this context, such as an ePortfolio, reflective tasks, lesson plans, or parent-teacher communication tasks.
Is the feedback practical?
Implementing the feedback may be impractical depending on the context of the subject and the course. Some comments may not be implementable at scale, and you’ll need to consider the unit’s logistical constraints. This is not to say the feedback should be dismissed, but further thought and creative workarounds may be required. This is where our resourcefulness and innovation as educators come into play.
Example 1
- Context: The subject has a cohort of 500+ students.
- Feedback: Comments revolve heavily around feedback: “I didn’t get detailed individual feedback on my assessment tasks.”
- Action and rationale: Detailed written feedback on a unit of 500+ students will not be feasible. However, at-scale feedback options can be leveraged: offer prompts for students to use AI to gain feedback on their work. Encourage students to access institutional academic writing support and implement peer feedback and self-reflection.
Example 2
- Context: The subject’s cohort has doubled, and educators struggle to manage the increase.
- Feedback: Comments focus on timely communication: “I didn’t get a reply to my email for two whole weeks.”
- Action and rationale: With a smaller cohort, educators may be able to reply individually to student emails, but as the cohort grows, expectations need to be set around basic course questions. The educators can set up a forum for general questions so that the teaching team can respond, rather than relying on an email that can get buried in one educator’s inbox.
Is the feedback representative?
This is a tough question to answer, and it’s important to think it through carefully. We often look for patterns in the data to know where to put our effort, so when we see a comment repeated throughout the feedback, it’s easy for us to understand that that’s something we need to pay attention to. However, this doesn’t mean that we should dismiss single voices. In particular, a single comment could represent a marginalised group’s experience, so it’s critical to address that comment. Comments that revolve around topics like not being represented or not feeling heard or seen highlight potential biases within a course, so these comments, even if they are individual, really need to be addressed.
Example 1
- Context: You teach a subject on politics. The majority of students in this subject are domestic.
- Feedback: One student commented on the course content: “This unit only focused on the Australian political context”.
- Action and rationale: This is appropriate if the unit is specifically about the Australian context. However, if it is about politics more broadly, educators could reevaluate the subject to include more diverse political contexts.
Example 2
- Context: You teach an undergraduate first-year subject. The majority of students in the unit scored highly.
- Feedback: One student commented on assessment instructions and clarity: “The assessment instructions weren’t clear. I didn’t get the grade I wanted because I couldn’t understand the instructions. ”
- Action and rationale: Any time clarity of information is raised, it should be checked by a third party. We may use terms and sentence structures and generally write in a way that is understood by the majority, but this could disadvantage specific students. Ask the staff in your institution to review the information (Educational Designers, Academic Skills Advisers, etc.), or if you’re short on time, have AI evaluate the clarity of your assessment instructions.
While the three criteria – suitability, practicality, and representativeness – provide a framework for evaluating student feedback, the process doesn’t end with decision-making. How we communicate these decisions back to students is equally important. Closing the feedback loop effectively requires intentional, transparent communication.
These actions help to close the feedback loop
When enacting feedback:
- Explicitly announce what changes you’re making and link them directly to student feedback
- Explain your reasoning and how the changes will benefit learning
- Acknowledge the students’ role in improving the subject
When choosing not to enact feedback:
- Validate the underlying concerns that prompted the feedback
- Explain your pedagogical reasoning clearly but empathetically
- Offer alternative solutions or support
- Use it as a teaching moment to help students understand your teaching practice.
The way we handle student feedback shapes more than just our current subject – it influences students’ future engagement with feedback processes. When students see their input treated with respect and consideration, even if not always implemented, they’re more likely to provide thoughtful, constructive feedback in the future.