It’s late in the evening; a student prepares to open their feedback; they hesitate…
For many students, receiving formative feedback is routine, expected, perhaps even welcomed. For others, it can be accompanied by tension, uncertainty, or fear. Formative feedback remains one of higher education’s most powerful teaching tools, shaping learning and supporting development. Yet despite its importance, the content, delivery, and experience of feedback vary considerably, and its impact, despite our best intentions, may not always land as intended.
This matters because feedback intersects with an increasingly diverse student population, bringing different learning preferences, expectations, and identities. Among these, neurodivergence has gained growing attention. As awareness and diagnosis increase, a meaningful proportion of students may identify as neurodivergent. Much of the focus has rightly been on access, inclusion, and reasonable adjustments that support participation and assessment. Far less attention has been given to a different but equally important question: how does feedback feel to these students?
The emotional dimension of feedback is often overlooked. Higher education has traditionally assumed a degree of learner resilience and emotional neutrality, and formative feedback is typically written for this audience. In principle, feedback combines verification and guidance, highlighting what has been done well, identifying areas for development, and suggesting next steps. In practice, however, feedback is delivered in a wide variety of styles and formats, often shaped by disciplinary culture, individual habit, or institutional pressures rather than shared pedagogical approaches.
Students entering higher education may therefore encounter a very different feedback environment from those experienced in schools, sixth forms, or further education colleges, where assessment-for-learning approaches have encouraged structured, developmental, and highly visible feedback practices through regular staff continuing professional development.
Feedback, however, rarely arrives as a purely cognitive experience. It frequently appears at moments when confidence is fragile and understanding is still emerging. Research suggests that students often experience strong emotional responses when feedback highlights gaps in knowledge or challenges developing competence. These are precisely the moments when feedback is most needed, but also when its impact may be most sensitive.
For some learners this experience may be intensified by rejection sensitivity dysphoria (RSD), an acute sensitivity to perceived criticism or judgement. Commonly discussed in relation to ADHD, autism, and AuDHD, RSD can involve a disproportionately strong emotional and physiological response to perceived rejection. In higher education, this can have significant implications. Feedback interpreted as rejection, even when intended constructively, may reduce engagement, delay action on advice, or discourage future intellectual risk-taking. In such circumstances, feedback intended to support learning can unintentionally undermine it.
Importantly, this challenge is not confined to neurodivergent learners. Neurodivergence instead provides a lens through which aspects of the feedback experience become more visible. It reminds us that feedback is not simply delivered; it is interpreted.
One emerging response is to shift attention from what feedback says to how it says it. Recent work has begun exploring the informational, relational, and emotional dimensions of feedback. RSD-informed perspectives, in particular, encouraging lecturers to consider how language, tone, and structure may be experienced by students.
There are five key points worth consideration by lecturers and tutors:
Framing and intent: Positioning feedback as part of an ongoing developmental process rather than a final judgement.
Language and tone: Using task-focused, non-personalised language that reduces the likelihood of comments being interpreted as evaluations of ability or identity.
Structure and predictability: Aligning feedback consistently with learning outcomes and assessment criteria using clear, recognisable formats that reduce ambiguity.
Emotional and cognitive load: Prioritising key messages and actionable next steps to avoid overwhelming students with excessive detail.
Agency and dialogue: Creating opportunities for reflection and response through learning questions or feedback conversations that strengthen student ownership of learning.
For many lecturers, these ideas will already resonate with existing practice. Higher education contains countless examples of thoughtful, student-centred feedback developed through experience and reflective teaching. The challenge lies less in identifying good practice and more in developing consistent approaches and opportunities for sharing them within and across a learning community.
Small adjustments, a rephrased comment, a revised template, a reflective prompt, or an invitation to respond, require little additional time but introduce greater intentionality. They acknowledge that feedback is shaped not only by what is written, but by how it is received.
As higher education continues to evolve, bringing feedback more explicitly into our collective academic conversations may prove valuable. Regular reviews of marking and feedback, peer dialogue, and teaching and learning communities can all help develop more emotionally intelligent approaches to formative feedback.
If feedback is to remain one of our most powerful teaching tools, paying greater attention to how it is experienced may be one of the most impactful changes we can make.
Summery from the Engineering & Product Design Education 28th International Conference 2026 (Bates and Gleed, 2026).
Bates, I. and Gleed, F. (2026). A FRAMEWORK FOR FORMATIVE FEEDBACK, ENCOURAGING ENGAGEMENT AND AUTONOMY OF NEURODIVERGENT STUDENTS. Proceedings of the International Conference on Engineering and Product Design Education EPDE 2026, pp.433–438. doi:10.35199/epde.2026.74.
Images AI generated using – https://deepai.org/machine-learning-model/text2img
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