Using active feedback to develop critical thinking in students

Rethinking feedback: Moving beyond teachers comments

Feedback is not just the teacher's comments on a piece of student work; it’s a generative process in which students create their understanding, emphasized Dr. Nicol in the keynote. The traditional method in which students do some work, and teachers provide comments leaves out the potential richness of inner feedback students can produce themselves. In fact, students are actively creating feedback all the time, even in the absence of teacher’s comments, via a process of comparing their work against some form of reference information and drawing conclusions based on those comparisons.

"Students are generating feedback all the time, even when there's no comments or dialogue from anyone else. The feedback process is a natural, ongoing process that permeates all learning, and it's a means by which students regulate their own learning.” - David Nicol, Research Professor, Adam Smith Business School

For instance, students may compare their work to textbook examples, other students' essays, or examples found online to assess their understanding. This kind of feedback, or inner feedback as defined by Professor Nicol isn’t merely reactive; it’s part of a continuous learning cycle that empowers students to reflect, compare, and generate new knowledge that lead to deeper learning and critical thinking. 

Teacher comments represent only a very small proportion of the information that students use to generate feedback.” – Professor David Nicol

This process of comparison is crucial because it allows students to reflect on their current knowledge and measure it against a reference point, be it a peer's work, a high-quality example, or expert input from external resources. This comparison allows them to generate new insights that lead to deeper learning and critical thinking.

What is inner feedback?

According to Prof. Nicol:

"So my definition is that inner feedback is a new knowledge that students generate when they compare their current knowledge against some reference information guided by their goals. And I say guided by their goals because the students are the protagonists of feedback. If they don't do anything with it, you know, or they're not interested in it, then it's not going to have any effect.”

Inner feedback refers to the self-generated knowledge that students create when they compare their current work against a benchmark. Guided by their goals, students can make meaningful improvements. However, it’s not simply about giving students resources and leaving them to it. Teachers must guide them with structured tasks that involve comparisons and encourage explicit reflections on those comparisons.

For example, students writing an essay might be asked to compare their work with three other essays—two from peers and one high-quality example from a previous cohort. Through these comparisons, students generate feedback on their performance, which can be more detailed and personalized than what a teacher might have time to provide. They become aware of gaps in their knowledge, discover alternative ways of approaching problems, and begin to think critically about their work.

The power of comparisons in critical thinking

The ability to generate comparison underlies many important cognitive processes namely memory, problem-solving, reasoning, learning, and even feedback, though this often goes unnoticed. Professor Nicol remarked: “Do you not need to compare new information and find the connections, then build new knowledge out of that? So it is embedded in the whole learning process, so in a way it is kind of invisible.”

Therefore, comparison plays a crucial role in developing feedback skills, and incorporating comparison into the feedback process helps students in a variety of ways:

‍1. Detailed self-evaluation: When students actively compare their work against multiple references, they often produce more detailed evaluations than a teacher might. This process pushes them to analyze not only surface-level errors but also deeper structural and critical thinking issues.‍

2. Different formats for deeper insight: Comparisons aren’t limited to written text. A student might compare an explanation of a biological process against a diagram or a flowchart, offering fresh perspectives that foster more complex understanding. Students aren’t limited to comparing written work with written feedback. For example, a student might compare their essay on a biological process to a diagram or flowchart of that process. The visual representation can highlight relationships or sequences that aren’t as clear in text form, pushing the student to engage in more sophisticated reasoning.‍

3. Development of autonomy: By actively generating feedback on their work, students are encouraged to develop the ability to regulate their learning, fostering independence and self-reliance.

‍4. Developing critical thinking: When students compare their work to multiple sources, such as peer work, exemplars, and teacher feedback, they’re encouraged to think critically about their choices, assumptions, and reasoning. The act of comparison requires them to evaluate not only their own performance but also the strengths and weaknesses of other perspectives, fostering deeper learning and understanding.

‍5. Targeting higher-order thinking: Comparisons push students beyond surface-level learning. They begin to engage in higher-order thinking skills like analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. Instead of merely correcting errors, students reflect on why certain approaches work better than others and how their understanding fits into broader disciplinary knowledge.

‍6. Scalability of feedback: This method also helps address the tension between wanting students to become independent learners while needing to manage teacher workload. The more feedback students can generate themselves, the less dependent they become on teacher interventions, allowing for feedback to scale without overburdening educators.

Turning active learning into active feedback

So how can institutions integrate comparisons into the feedback process, in other words, turning active learning into active feedback?

The shift from active learning to active feedback doesn’t require drastic changes in the classroom. The process is relatively simple: students complete a task, compare their work against various resources, and make their reflections explicit. This can take many forms—written, oral, or even graphical outputs. The key is to guide students to make thoughtful comparisons and encourage them to express what they’ve learned from those comparisons. As stated by David: 

"So my definition is that inner feedback is a new knowledge that students generate when they compare their current knowledge against some reference information guided by their goals. And I say guided by their goals because the students are the protagonists of feedback. If they don't do anything with it, you know, or they're not interested in it, then it's not going to have any effect.”

Explicitness is also a key factor because it helps turn a natural process—students learning from their work—into a powerful pedagogical tool. Students do not only learn to reflect on their learning but also transfer these insights to new contexts, sharpening their critical thinking.

"This is the most important principle of this. It requires not very much, just getting the students to actually make an explicit output. And that turns active learning into active feedback.” – Professor David Nicol

Practical classroom application: The case of Financial Accounting course

Suzanne McCallum, Senior Lecturer in Accountancy at Adam Smith School, University of Glasgow shared her successful story of applying the principles of active feedback in her first-year financial accounting course. 

In this course, instead of implementing a typical feedback process, where Suzanne would provide comments on the essays, she guided students through a self-feedback process instead.

This self-feedback activity involved students writing a short 500-word essay, and then comparing it to three essays (two randomly selected from their peers and one high-quality exemplar from a previous year). This process involves 4 review rounds, each round providing a more refined self-evaluation. A detailed breakdown of the review rounds can be found below: 

1. Self-review 1: After writing the essay, students compare it with peer essay 1 by answering a series of questions: 
2. Self-review 2: So after they've done self-review 1, they move on and they look at peer essay number two - the high-quality one and compare it with their essays, answering the same questions. 
3. Self-review 3: Students go through the process again, comparing their essays to peer essay 3. However, the questions for this round are different, as they asked students to reflect on what they learned, rank the essays including theirs from best to least good, and to name two things they would improve. 
4. Self-review 4: For the final review round, students reflect on their work based on comments from two peers by answering questions about what they have learned from their peer reviews, and what additional changes they would make to their essays.

"The results were remarkable according to Suzanne considering the students’ nature and preference. They're very focused on the numbers. They don't like to write anything in the first place. So would they take this seriously and would they write much in their self reviews? Well, actually, I was amazed by the volume of information the students generated." – Suzanne McCallum

By the final round of comparisons, over 90% of the students were able to generate feedback that matched or exceeded the comments Suzanne would have provided as a teacher. Even those who did not fully match teacher expectations identified the most significant issues, showing that this method is highly effective at helping students become their critics.

"I marked the essays in the way I normally would and produced feedback comments just for the research study, not to give to the students. We could then compare the feedback comments I would have provided with what the students produced in their self feedback reviews. What they achieved was really amazing because the students were able to match and exceed the comments I would have provided.” – Suzanne McCallum‍

Most importantly, the students also began to reflect on deeper aspects of writing that go beyond surface-level corrections. They discussed how their essays would be received by a reader, thought about alternative approaches to the same problem, and considered how their argumentation and evidence presentation could be improved. These reflections signal a move toward higher-order critical thinking, which is the ultimate goal of education. “Making comparisons forces you to engage and understand the the material more than just getting told what to fix or amend.”, commented a student on the impact of the self-review activities. 

"Rather than just being able to match what I would have said, the students actually exceeded that and in many different ways. First of all, in relation to the criteria, they gave a lot more detail because they weren't as time bounded as I would be when looking at their own work. They identified additional issues and gave really detailed action points on how they could improve their work. They also went well beyond just the criteria and moved to other aspects which would be impossible to achieve if just using comments from me." – Suzanne McCallum

What’s more, students were able to improve their work after the self-generated feedback process. After the review rounds, 70% of the students managed to improve their grades with “absolutely no comments” from the teachers. 

The benefits of this feedback comparison activity isn’t limited to only writing assignment, but can also be adapted to different subject domains (e.g. medicine, biology, etc.) and activity types. Below you can find a number of learning activities that where self-generated feedback can be implemented, shared by Suzanne: 

1. Theory-application comparisons
2. Analysis through different lenses (using different comparators)
3. Creative thinking – comparators quite different from what students have produced
4. Problem-solving - comparisons against expert think-aloud videos, different problem-solving methods
5. Knowledge elaboration/perspectives – different genre (e.g., poem against essay) or modality comparisons (e.g., diagram versus text)
6. Metacognition – comparing earlier work with later work, earlier goals with later goals
7. Many possibilities in areas of skills or emotional development using narratives as comparison resource

Overcoming concerns

Some educators raise concerns that self-generated peer feedback might lead students astray, with peers leading each other down the wrong path. Suzanne addressed this concern by explaining that peer comments are not essential to the process. Suppose teachers are concerned about the accuracy of peer feedback. In that case, they can provide structured, reliable comparison resources, such as high-quality exemplars or professional sources, for students to use as benchmarks.

"If you're worried actually about what the peers say, take out the peer comments completely, because that's not an integral part of the process. It is the students who are actually making judgments and evaluating where they are themselves.” – Suzanne McCallum

Another concern is the time and effort required to implement this approach, especially when students are already balancing heavy workloads. However, Suzanne emphasized that active feedback doesn’t necessarily add extra tasks. Instead, it leverages existing assignments and learning activities, transforming them into richer feedback opportunities. By embedding the comparison and reflection process into tasks that students are already doing, teachers can enhance learning without overburdening students.

Addressing AI concerns

Suzanne also emphasized the importance of integrating AI into the feedback comparison process, as well as addressing several key issues presented by AI technology. 

One of the primary concerns with AI is the potential for bias, inaccuracy, and lack of source verification. To address this, it is important for students to critically engage with AI outputs by comparing them against other reliable sources of information. This includes challenging AI models through different forms of comparison, such as contrasting text-based responses with visual diagrams or cross-referencing data with real-world observations. These comparative exercises help students identify inconsistencies and reinforce the importance of human judgment in evaluating AI-generated content.

Another issue is the question of academic integrity—whether the student or the machine is truly doing the work. To address this, teachers can focus on making inner feedback processes more explicit, thereby emphasizing the thinking and learning that occurs throughout the task, rather than just the final product. By encouraging students to generate self-feedback for summative assessments, they can engage in a deeper reflection on their own learning journey, helping them take ownership of their work and reinforcing the value of independent thought.

The use of AI in education also raises concerns about the potential loss of the human dimension in learning. To mitigate this, it’s essential to integrate AI tools like ChatGPT into dialogic comparisons, fostering collaboration, sharing, and critique among students. By amplifying these AI-generated outputs with human dialogue, educators can provide a richer context for comparison tasks, encompassing ethical, social, personal, and environmental dimensions. This approach ensures that AI remains a tool to support learning rather than replace the critical human elements of interaction, judgment, and ethical reasoning.

A scalable model for deeper learning

The concept of inner feedback and active feedback offers a scalable model for developing critical thinking and independent learning in students. By shifting the focus from teacher-driven comments to student-generated feedback, educators can empower students to take control of their own learning. This method allows students to engage more deeply with the material, encourages reflective thinking, and fosters the critical skills they will need in the real world.

Moreover, this approach helps address two critical challenges in education: how to promote student autonomy while still providing guidance, and how to scale feedback effectively without increasing teacher workload. By embedding comparison and reflection into regular classroom activities, educators can create a feedback-rich environment that leads to lasting improvements in student performance and critical thinking skills.

As we continue to rethink the role of feedback in education, the principles of inner feedback offer a promising way forward. They align with the growing emphasis on student-centered learning, critical thinking, and the development of self-regulated learners, making them essential tools for the modern educator.

Technology-enhanced feedback comparison activity

Technology can greatly help enhance the design and implementation of the feedback comparison activity. Below are multiple ways in which teachers can utilize pedagogical solutions, specifically FeedbackFruits solutions to automate manual tasks and maximize the impact of the self-generated review process.

Using Peer Review for self-review rounds. Within this tool, students are randomly assigned to review their peers’s work. Teachers have the options to add detailed review rubrics and open questions that require students to compare their work with that of their peers. The rubrics can be created from scratch or adapted from the existing templates, which have been developed and shared by other teachers. 

To support the final review round, where students reflect on their work based on two peers’ comments, teachers can use the self-assessment feature. This feature allows adding a final step to the activity that requires students to compare their work against peers’ reviews, then answer to several questions. 

As for the peer review stage, the Feedback Coach feature can be enabled to guide students in delivering quality feedback. This feature is part of Acai – FeedbackFruits pedagogy-driven AI solution. 

To visualize this activity setup, we have created a learning journey that showcases each self-review round with the integration of pedagogical technology. You can access and download it here.