An investigation of undergraduate psychology students’ perception of and engagement with feedback across the three years of study

The topic of students’ perception of feedback and what they do with the feedback they receive has gained increasing attention in the educational literature recently in an attempt to identify areas which require educators’ attention. However, research in this area has typically been narrow as these findings fail to reveal students relationship with feedback at the start of their undergraduate degree and how this alters as they progress throughout their degree. To address this issue we conducted a large-scale cross-sectional empirical investigation in which the majority of first, second and third year students responded to a comprehensive 45 item survey measuring their views on a number of issues relating to feedback, including but not limited to: whether they are happy with the amount and type of feedback they receive, how they use the feedback to improve and areas which they feel require improvement. Findings generally revealed a positive picture with most students reporting they attended to the feedback they received and used it as a learning resource to improve future work. These positive findings were balanced by some suboptimal practices with feedback preventing students from fully engaging with this important learning tool. Data analysis indicated across year consistency in areas that students are less positive about; suggesting areas of perceived weaknesses identified by students early on in their degree remain an issue for them for the remainder of their course. This dissatisfaction was especially prominent in the third year group who consistently responded more negatively than their first and second year counterparts. We recommend addressing the issues highlighted in our study should be the focus of any approach undertaken by institutions to improve the feedback model they employ