"A university’s approach to feedback reflects multiple aspects of its relationship with students. Decisions about assessment policy affect the whole institutional landscape, including retention, student experience, National Student Survey results, transparency, staff workload and student employment, as well as students’ academic progress. Feedback is embedded within a system, and innovating in feedback benefits from acknowledging its multidimensional, interdependent features. However, conventional approaches to feedback tend to be limited because they are not framed within the broader institutional system. In this chapter, we introduce the Action Feedback Protocol (AFP), a systems-oriented approach to feedback that aligns student feedback literacy with a simple, efficient approach to producing feedback, all of which is directed towards encouraging the learner to take action."

MacLaren, A., Madsen, F., Voigt, A., Buckley, A. and Farrington, T. (2026) ‘Managing the Rubik’s Cube of Assessment: The Action Feedback Protocol’, in Blankinship, B., Orzechowski, P., Desvages, C., Banas, K., Noè, U., Oldnall, C., Sharifi Far, S., Llewellyn-MacRae, C., Alex, B., Evkaya, O. and McManus, F. (eds) Teaching Programming Across Disciplines: A Collection of Articles on Teaching Coding Kindly, Openly, and Together. Edinburgh: The University of Edinburgh.

https://teaching-programming.github.io/book/C35_action-feedback-plan.html

"It became increasingly apparent to me that students did not understand their role in the feedback process (Winstone et al., 2017), and academics lacked clear, simple routines that support co-ordination. Effective teamwork relies on clear roles, robust routines and shared purpose, but none of these conditions were being protected. The result is a loss of agency on both sides. This tension  demonstrates how interdependent our sense of agency and purpose is: educators rely on feedback-literate students, and students rely on coherent, consistent approaches to feedback. It also highlights that students are equal custodians of academic quality. Empowered students amplify the quality of their own education. So, we are all stuck in a disordered system and the only way out is together."

MacLaren A. (2026) Feedback as teamwork: restoring agency & academic quality through the Action Feedback Protocol. Research Intelligence. (166), 16–17.

https://www.bera.ac.uk/publication/spring-2026

By Andrew MacLaren and Antonia Voigt 

"The roll-out at Heriot Watt involved a university-wide campaign led by the Student Union promoting the feedback literacy and ‘take action’ modules, which now sit in a permanent space on our ‘Skills Hub’ website. It also involved a series of workshops to support staff in adopting the AFP. The result has been an organic adoption of the protocol across our international campuses in the UK, Dubai and Malaysia"

https://ntf-association.com/the-action-feedback-protocol-a-journey-of-innovation-and-partnership/