CRADLE suggests… Read our new guide on Feedback and GenAI

15 August 2025

Recently the team at CRADLE have been working hard on the latest best practice in the age of GenAI. We’re pleased to provide a new guide in our CRADLE suggests… series, where we’ve done all the hard work so you don’t have to. Our latest guide looks at Feedback and GenAI.

What is CRADLE suggests…?

CRADLE suggests… is a series of briefings from CRADLE that translates our own research into practice-based possibilities. The series covers topics such as feedback, assessment design, academic integrity, assessment for inclusion and evaluative judgement.

GenAI and the Feedback Ecosystem

It’s assessment time, which means many of us are thinking about the kind of feedback information that will be most useful for our students. But new questions are emerging, and we may not yet have ready answers for them. Generative AI is changing the way students engage with feedback, using tools like ChatGPT to clarify rubrics, make sense of comments, or revise work based on AI-generated suggestions.

In this new landscape, providing comments is no longer business as usual and for many of us it’s unclear how we ought to respond.

To help, we’ve released some of our thoughts on what we suggest matters in terms of our response. CRADLE suggests… Feedback and GenAI has been designed for Deakin staff and provides research-based insights as well as some practical suggestions on what actions might be of value. This document also includes links to some of our latest research in this area in case you would like to dive deeper into this topic. However, whilst we hope this is useful in terms of the immediate practical questions you might face, there’s much more to consider.

The fact that students are turning to AI specifically for feedback illustrates how feedback is assembled from multiple sources, at different times, with different intentions. Feedback goes beyond a bounded exchange between teacher and student to a much wider network of interactions, much of which we as educators, have little control over. So we need a way of conceptualising feedback that captures this complexity but also allows us to teach.

One way we’ve started thinking about this is through the metaphor of a feedback ecosystem

Ecosystems are made up of interconnected parts that affect one another over time. No single actor is in control but, instead, stability comes from the relationships between elements. Thinking about feedback this way helps us recognise that educators, students, technologies, policies, and tasks all shape the flow and meaning of feedback. It also helps explain why our role as educators can sometimes be powerful and sometimes not. And it also helps us grasp why adding AI to the mix isn’t just a technical shift, it can transform the whole network.

To explore this in more depth, CRADLE is undertaking a two-year research project into GenAI and feedback. We’ll be working closely with Deakin staff and students to better understand how GenAI is being used, what it offers, and how it might be integrated thoughtfully into the feedback ecosystems we already have. This guide is the beginning of that conversation, there’s much more to come!

Download the guide now