Teaching students to learn from feedback: a narrative review of best practices for educators on essay-based assignments for improved feedback literacy

Essay-based assignments form a big part of undergraduate-level teaching, especially in humanities and social sciences. Reviewing and providing feedback on these types of assignments can take a lot of time and effort from an educator, which makes it very disappointing when some of the students fail to learn from the comments they receive. In this narrative review, I posit that failure to engage and learn from feedback is not something that we cannot change. Fundamentally, the ability to engage with feedback is a skill that not every student possesses, and once we as tutors start giving feedback the right way, we can improve student engagement. This paper has several recommendations for practitioners: first, that it is important to teach the students how to engage with feedback and learn from it; and second, that any feedback given has to have a very clear goal-directed instruction on how a student can take this comment and expand it to their future assignments. Following a brief scoping review on the effectiveness of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), I found that these programs are still quite poor at generating original arguments and showing critical thinking. However, giving the students access to online editors that can fix their syntactic and grammatical errors can both help close attainment gaps for non-native speakers and help to keep the feedback concentrated on higher-level skills.