Reimagining Feedback for Mental Wellbeing in an Academic Environment

As the Programme Lead for the MSc Neuroscience at King’s College, I often engage with students.

When I speak with our MSc Neuroscience students, one theme emerges consistently: feedback shapes not just academic growth, but emotional resilience and mental wellbeing. In today’s high-pressure, fee-paying postgraduate landscape, students expect clarity, compassion, and support. And rightly so. For many, feedback can either validate effort and guide improvement, or - if mishandled - undermine confidence and contribute to stress. Receiving feedback, especially when it points out weaknesses, can trigger self-doubt. That’s why it’s crucial not only to provide information but also to help students interpret and emotionally process it. The stakes have never been higher.

At the same time, for staff across the university, the act of supporting feedback and assessment is becoming increasingly complex and emotionally demanding. As higher education scales up, academic staff face growing pressures from marking, pastoral care, and research. Meanwhile, colleagues in educational support and admin teams manage rising workloads around assessment logistics, student communications, and well-being referrals. The result is a shared and cumulative strain on mental health that affects all those contributing to the student experience. This tension brings with it a valuable opportunity: to reimagine feedback as a cornerstone of wellbeing, not just academic performance.

Moving Beyond Traditional Feedback

Traditional feedback – brief and vague comments alongside a grade - often leaves students with more questions than answers. Without depth, feedback risks becoming a source of uncertainty and anxiety, especially for students navigating a competitive academic environment.

To address this, we are shifting towards a multimodal feedback model, whereby students, alongside traditional marker feedback, also receive feedback on language use in their writing. This approach  recognises emotional and educational needs by providing richer, more comparative insights. The model aims at focusing on aspects such as students’ writing structure or vocabulary complexity and compares it in a sensitive way with their peers.

Our final goal is to reduce the emotional ambiguity students often feel. This clarity builds confidence, and supports mental wellbeing.

Using the Cohort as a Mirror, Not a Measure

A core innovation in our programme has been the development of the "King’s Corpus", a collection of anonymised essays analysed for linguistic features like readability, sentence complexity, and cohesion. This comparative feedback is not about ranking students, but about helping them understand their strengths and challenges in context, awareness and growth.

Linguistic feedback supports students as they become more conscious writers, helping them recognise patterns in their own writing.  This is especially helpful for multilingual students and students transitioning from other academic genres.  It also supports long term improvement as students can apply this linguistic knowledge across modules. 

This kind of feedback is specific, depersonalised, and emotionally safe. It encourages students to take ownership of their progress without feeling judged, an important balance in protecting self-esteem.

Making Feedback Emotionally Accessible

As receiving feedback can trigger self-doubt, it’s important to help students interpret and emotionally process the information they receive. To this end, we’re developing resources like a feedback glossary and a “next steps” guide, tools that break down linguistic feedback terms into simple language and actionable advice. These supports reduce cognitive load and help students engage with feedback constructively, without feeling overwhelmed.

We are also running focus groups to understand how students emotionally respond to linguistic feedback, and what helps them feel more in control. It’s not just about academic literacy, it’s about emotional literacy, too.

Staff Wellbeing Matters, Too

Feedback isn’t only emotionally demanding for students. For staff, it requires time, empathy, and often emotional labour. Delivering quality feedback to large student numbers and with tight marking deadlines can contribute to staff burnout. That’s why our model aims not to replace, but to support, academic markers, by integrating automated tools and cohort-level insights that relieve some of the feedback burden.

Old student assignments sitting unused on university online platforms could be a useful source of information. By analysing the language in these assignments, we can create smarter educational feedback tools and offer richer and more personalised help to students.  When staff feel equipped and supported, they’re better able to support students in turn. As the demands of higher education continue to grow, it’s essential we also recognise and support the wellbeing of these teams, whose dedication sustains not just our programmes, but the people within it.

Feedback as Dialogue, Not Diagnosis

Ultimately, our vision is to make feedback a dialogue, one that builds trust, reflection, and growth.

By involving peer perspectives, data-informed insights, and self-directed tools, we aim to shift feedback from a source of anxiety to a pathway for resilience.  Our students are not passive recipients of grades: they are curious, capable future scientists and clinicians. With the right support, they can navigate feedback with confidence and emotional maturity.

Why It Matters

Feedback is not simply about academic correction. It’s about cultivating a sense of belonging, purpose, and capability, all vital ingredients for mental health. When done well, feedback can help students see not just what they’ve done, but who they are becoming.

Which is what we aim to do on the MSc Neuroscience programme.