If students generate feedback by making comparisons against comments,

why should comments be the only comparator? [David Nicol, 2020]

This website and the arguments herein do not just represent an addition to the literature on feedback, some ideas about how to make current feedback practices more effective. Rather the ideas herein are a challenge to the notion of feedback itself as currently conceptualised. 

This website re-examines feedback through the lens of comparison. It starts from the premise that students learn by comparing their work against both their inner prior knowledge and against different sources of external information and that they generate inner feedback out of those comparisons. Based on this, it investigates what students learn when they compare their work against information, other than teacher comments, such as information in journal articles, in diagrams, in the work of peers, in rubrics, exemplars, videos and other resources online and offline. They might also compare against information derived from observations of others or events. I use the word comparison deliberately rather than evaluative judgement as all judgements at core involve a comparison, and research on evalutive judgement tends to assume the the comparators are either, rubrics or sssessment criteria and/or exemplars. I argue that anything that would improve students ability to think critically might serve as a comparator. The word comparison also begs the question 'what is being evaluated against what?' whereas evaluative judgement does not always surface this consideration. Furthermore when people analyse, problem-sovle, make decisions, self-assess or reflect a comparator is always implicated. Internal emotional reactions might also serve as comparison information influencing what students produce or what feedback they generate.

Initial evidence across a range of disciplines shows that when students make comparisons of their work against different kinds of information, they generate more varied feedback than from comments alone, as each comparator takes students to a different place. They see their work through a different lens. Also inner feedback builds and becomes more elaborate from one comparison to the next, and multiple comparisons lead to feedback that surpasses what students generate from teacher comments. 

This idea is easy to implement as it builds on a natural process - the making of feedback comparisons - something that we are all doing all the time anyway, even without receiving comments. These ideas have been researched at the University of Glasgow, University of Manchester, University of Padova, Italy and have been piloted across a range of disciplines at Trinity College Dublin and in Medicine at the University of Edinburgh and University of Utrecht. This new lens on feedback has not to date been the subject of systematic research so there is a lot to learn.

What is clear however from current research is that the key to unlocking the power of inner feedback is to have students mindfully make comparisons of their work against different kinds of information and to make their learning from these comparisons explicit through writing self-feedback, through discussion with peers or through actions to improve their work.  Writing their own self-feedback comments is especially powerful as it makes visible to students their own feedback capability which is empowering. This approach:

1. Acknowledges that students are the architects of their own feedback while recognising that learning from feedback can be improved by approrpriate learning designs that scaffold students' feedback productions.
2. Helps build students capacity to regulate their own learning, as inner feedback is the catalyst for the self-regulation of all learning.
3. Improves students' attainment and the range of feedback students generate without placing excessive burden on the educator as comparison opportunities can be accessed in any claaroom situation and comparison resources are reusalbe
4. Gives teachers better information about what feedback students are generating and hence about what comments they really need.

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