Mara Research Journals MR Journal of Humanity and Social Sciences Vol. 1, No. 1, July 2016, Pages 1 - 12 1 Mara Research Journal of Humanity & Social Sciences Vol. 1, No. 1, July 2016, Pages 1 - 12 The use of Feedback to Engage and Empower Students to Self Regulate their Own Learning Anne Somba*, Ger Obura, Boniface Itevete, Margaret Njuguna, Nooh Wandera, Jones Mulwa and Newton Omukabe. Members of the Languages department, Jaffery Secondary School E-Mail: waceracs@gmail.com*, gerobura@yahoo.com, bonvete@gmail.com, wamnjuguna@yahoo.com, nooh_w@yahoo.com, jeanmulwa@yahoo.com, omukabewa@yahoo.com * Corresponding author Received: June 21, 2016 Published: July 20, 2016 Abstract Every educator derives substantial satisfaction from seeing their students make progress in mustering skills. A lot of teacher effort is consequently geared towards bringing about improvement in learner’s acquisition of skills. Most of this effort is in terms of assessment feedback. Scholars such as (Stuart 2004, McCann & Saunders 2009, Chikery & Gamson 1987) are in agreement that assessment feedback is central to learners, acquisition of skills. At Jaffery Secondary School, we recognize the vast potential that assessment feedback holds. This study investigates how feedback can be crafted so that it captures the interest of students, gives them information concerning what they have achieved in the learning process, what constitutes the gap between achievement and the lack of it, as well as providing accessible guidance for the same. If this ideal were to be achieved, learners would be empowered to take charge of their own learning. According to Taras (2003), student engagement with assessment feedback can be maximized if learners are made to see feedback as part of the learning process and not as a teacher-owned exercise. This study falls under action research because it is inspired by challenges that language teachers at Jaffery Secondary School encounter as far students’ interpretation and engagement with feedback is concerned. We have used a purposeful study sample of Year 11 students and data was collected via questionnaires. A major finding of the investigation is that 40% of our study sample read feedback given by teachers only in some subjects. 25% of these attribute this to the fact that assessment feedback is mostly negative thus demotivating. There is need for further research in this area to investigate effective ways of stimulating high achievers whose work requires little or no correction. Keywords: High school, education, students’ satisfaction, students’ engagement, students’ assessment, achievements © 2016 by the author(s); Mara Research Journals (Nairobi, Kenya) 1. INTRODUCTION One major responsibility of any teacher the world over is to assess their students and to give them feedback or a report of their performance. Feedback takes many shapes: it can be a mark or a grade, it can be written or oral comments or both, it can be given to an individual student, to a group of students, or to a whole class, and it may even be from peers. Whatever form it may assume, the aim of all feedback is to improve student performance. However, teachers often lament of students who do not read teacher’s comments meant to help them improve. This means that giving feedback is not an end in itself – how feedback is received by the student is central in determining whether the feedback will achieve its basic aim of improving student performance.