Feedback and Self-Regulated Learning: How Feedback Can Contribute to Increase Students’ Autonomy as Learners

Feedback is a scaffolding process that facilitates continuity of student learning, without which assessment becomes a firewall that separates the effort to learn from the reward of learning. Without feedback, no formative assessment is possible and students’ chances of improving their learning are considerably reduced. Research and projects in this field have provided an increasingly accurate picture of feedback, rendering it possible to identify with ever-greater precision the aims, foci, agents, types, means and timing of feedback offered to students. Considerable advances have been made in the last 10 years as regards the theoretical foundations underpinning feedback; a set of principles has been identified to guide its implementation, and new concepts have been introduced, such as sustainable feedback or feedforward, which question the theoretical premises on which feedback is based. Student participation in the feedback process has opened up new areas to explore, such as self-assessment and peer assessment. Furthermore, technology is redefining the way in which feedback is conceived and managed, enabling students, classmates and teachers to employ new channels of communication for real-time or deferred dialogue that are capable of improving or enhancing learning. In short, it is possible at the moment to speak of a revival of interest in the role played by feedback and in the link between feedback and self-regulated learning, in a scenario in which present-day society is moving forward not on the back of certainty but on the basis of conflict resolution, and higher education must meet training needs in an increasingly uncertain professional framework.