Active Self-Feedback
Helping students become the best judges of their own work
Active self-feedback moves students from waiting to be told how they did to working it out for themselves. Students compare their work with exemplars, peers' work or other comparators and then write feedback to themselves. Building on David Nicol's research on internal feedback, it develops the evaluative judgement and self-regulation that study and professional life demand. It matters more than ever now that AI can generate feedback in seconds. The benefit comes from students doing the comparing themselves, not from being handed the answer.
New research on when to use exemplars
Before or after? The answer surprised us.
Our latest paper with David Nicol directly compared students analysing exemplars before creating their work with students analysing them after producing a first draft. Students who used exemplars afterwards produced higher quality reports, wrote more actionable and personalised self-feedback, and found the experience more empowering. They felt the sequence let them learn from their own mistakes. Drafting first and then comparing with exemplars leads to better outcomes than the traditional approach of showing exemplars before students begin.
Nicol, D. and Rose, J. (2025) Promoting learner self-regulation: is it better to give students exemplars before or after producing work? Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education.
https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2025.2534870
Read the full paper
New research on intellectual development
Can self-feedback help students develop as thinkers?
Our forthcoming paper in Accounting Education measured the intellectual development of 80 engaged first-year accounting students on Perry's scheme as they worked through essays and self-feedback tasks over eight weeks. 86% moved up at least one position, and more than half showed a higher position in their self-feedback than in their essays, which suggests that self-feedback gives students more room to show how they think.
Rose, J. and Stoner, G. (forthcoming) Enabling and measuring engaged first year students' intellectual development towards contextually evaluating knowledge and critical thinking. Accounting Education.
https://doi.org/10.1080/09639284.2026.2748999
Read more about the research and Perry rater training
Resources for educators
Working with the Institute of Teaching and Learning, Louise Walker, Jen McBride, Sophie Marshall and Jenni developed a guide for academics with case studies from across subjects at the University of Manchester. It shows how structured self-reflection helps students build confidence, deepen their learning and improve their work.
Explore the guide for academics
Our pilot project at Manchester is now complete. These videos explain how we put active self-feedback into practice and what we learned about its impact on student outcomes.
Watch the pilot project video
Watch the follow-up video
Jenni explained how students learn to use feedback as feedforward by writing feedback on real student work in an episode of the L&T Chat Show.
Listen to Jenni Rose on Active Feedback (L&T Chat Show, 2022)
GenAI prompts that create self-feedback activities
To make implementation easier, we've created two free GenAI prompts. The teacher prompt creates editable self-feedback worksheets tailored to your context. The student prompt lets students upload their brief and a comparator, then generates self-feedback questions and gives them their own words back as a worksheet. To use either one, download it, upload it to a GenAI tool such as Copilot, Claude or ChatGPT, and ask it to "Apply this prompt".
Download the teacher prompt
Download the student prompt
We have also created a Custom GPT prompt that takes students through Gibbs' Reflective Cycle with self-feedback, guiding them from description and feelings through evaluation and analysis to their own conclusions and action plan.
Download the Gibbs Reflective Cycle self-feedback prompt
Resources for students
Watch a short introduction to active self-feedback
Download the worksheet for responding to employer rejections It helps students learn from a rejection even when the employer gives no feedback.
Browse more free resources in the National Repository
Further reading
Nicol, D. (2021) The power of internal feedback: exploiting natural comparison processes. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2020.1823314
Nicol, D. and McCallum, S. (2022) Making internal feedback explicit: exploiting the multiple comparisons that occur during peer review. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2021.1924620
For accounting educators, David Nicol and Suzanne McCallum's European Accounting Association session shows how active feedback develops students' critical thinking, with examples from both narrative and quantitative accounting. A recording is available.
Using active feedback to develop students' critical thinking skills (EAA, 2023)
Share your self-feedback work
We're building a fuller picture of self-feedback research and practice across institutions. If you're researching self-feedback, or have resources and approaches you're willing to share, please get in touch. We'd especially welcome publications, teaching materials, conference presentations, case studies and examples of how you're using self-feedback in your context, as these open up opportunities for collaboration.