Do students profit from feedback?

Undergraduate students in psychology were given the opportunity to exchange the traditional exam with portfolio assessment. The students received written feedback, by way of a standard feedback form, on two of the three essays of the portfolio. To investigate whether students attend to and act on the feedback, a comparison was made between unofficial marks on the first draft of the first essay and the official marks on the full portfolio at the end of the semester. With approximately 20% of the first drafts being unacceptable in the end only 1.6% of the portfolios failed to reach the level of acceptance. The result is taken to indicate that the students did indeed attend to and profit from the written feedback.