Assessment and feedback that would promote student learning is very important in teaching. Generally, the importance of feedback on assessment administered cannot be overemphasised. Providing students with feedback during teaching and learning is of paramount importance, as it helps to enhance students understanding and learning. However, the concept of ‘feedforward’ has recently emerged as critically important in assessment. Both feedback and feedforward are critically important in teaching, learning and assessment. Feedforward is described as a process that seeks to provide students constructive advice on how to improve in the future. Effective feedback has more impact on the student’s future learning and ability of making changes and improvements to one’s future practice. This is emphasised as one of the significant principles of good feedback, which regulates that feedback should feedforward for it to be used to inform future work. This review maps patterns in research on feedforward in assessment, between 2014 and 2024. It also looks at how feedforward is defined, especially in higher education. To select relevant sources for the study, a systematic literature review approach will be used. A review of feedforward in assessment literature will be conducted to explore main characteristics, benefits, challenges and educational implications. As the study seeks to explore how the notion of feedforward is implemented and promoted according to the available literature. A qualitative thematic approach will be used to analyse the literature. This research will support future research and the implementation of feedforward in assessment by providing a framework and constructive guidelines for feedforward practices. Feedforward is a relatively new approach in assessing students, therefore this research would lay a good foundation for feedback with good impact on learning.

Keywords: Assessment, feedback, feedforward, higher education, teaching and learning.