The Feedback Cafe - creating opportunities for dialogue between staff and students regarding assessment and feedback

Higher education institutions face significant challenges in providing effective assessment and feedback practices that foster student learning and engagement. Feedback practices can be unproductive when high staff workload meets low student engagement and a lack of assessment literacy means feedback can become unmeaningful to students. Feedback should be a student-focused process where students are supported as active participants who are able to apply feedback to improve their performance.

To improve assessment and feedback literacy and the engagement of students with their feedback we introduced an initiative we called the Feedback Café. The Feedback Café is run as a drop-in stall, manned by educators and student partners, which provides a regular opportunity for students to ask questions about assessment and feedback including interpreting feedback and how to feed-forward.

The aims of this study are to share the perceptions of students and the lessons learned from running the Feedback Café for the past three years. We surveyed two cohorts of undergraduate students (from 2021-2023) to understand their perceptions of the Feedback Café.

We gathered both quantitative and qualitative data, and conducted a thematic analysis of open-text response. We surveyed two cohorts of undergraduate students (from 2021-2023) to understand their perceptions of the Feedback Café. We gathered both quantitative and qualitative data, and conducted a thematic analysis of open-text response.

Respondents indicated the Cafe was useful in a number of ways; as an informal place to ask questions related to feedback, to gain help interpreting feedback and how to apply feedback to make improvements in their work. The free-text comments provided further benefits of the Feedback Cafe namely providing signposting to resources for students to use to improve their work independently, the opportunity for pre-assessment support and the internalization of standards including an improved understanding of the marking criteria. We were also able to incorporate the preferences and needs of students into a guide for those interested in implementing a Feedback Café initiative.

We find the Feedback Café as an initiative that is generalizable to any programme where students receive feedback and is a beneficial addition to a programme’s portfolio of assessment and feedback provision, providing students with an opportunity for verbal feedback and two-way dialogue with relatively low staff workload. By sharing our insights we aim to contribute to the efforts to improve assessment and feedback practices in higher education.