Feedback in Higher and Professional Education

Understanding it and doing it well

David Boud, Elizabeth Molloy, David Boud, Elizabeth Molloy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415692281
• eBook ISBN: 9781135107468
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Adult Education

Learners complain that they do not get enough feedback, and educators resent that although they put considerable time into generating feedback, students take little notice of it. Both parties agree that it is very important.

Feedback in Higher and Professional Education explores what needs to be done to make feedback more effective. It examines the problem of feedback and suggests that there is a lack of clarity and shared meaning about what it is and what constitutes doing it well. It argues that new ways of thinking about feedback are needed.

There has been considerable development in research on feedback in recent years, but surprisingly little awareness of what needs to be done to improve it and good ideas are not translated into action. The book provides a multi-disciplinary and international account of the role of feedback in higher and professional education. It challenges three conventional assumptions about feedback in learning:

• That feedback constitutes one-way flow of information from a knowledgeable person to a less knowledgeable person.
• That the job of feedback is complete with the imparting of performance-related information.
• That a generic model of best-practice feedback can be applied to all learners and all learning situations

It seeking a new approach to feedback, it proposes that it is necessary to recognise that learners need to be much more actively involved in seeking, generating and using feedback. Rather than it being something they are subjected to, it must be an activity that they drive.

Chapter 1
What is the problem with feedback?

David Boud

Elizabeth Molloy

We all experience the influence of feedback in our lives and in our work. We are told that we can’t park our car in a particular space, and we choose to go elsewhere. Our students tell us that they don’t understand a point we have made in class and we find another way of explaining it. We get referees’ comments on a paper submitted to a journal, we make revisions and resubmit it. These are familiar examples of everyday feedback. Feedback is a normal part of our lives; it is ubiquitous. If it seems to work so normally and so regularly, why then does it appear to be so troublesome in higher and professional education? Why is it that students complain more about feedback than almost any others parts of their courses? Is what we are doing so wrong, or are there other explanations of what is rapidly becoming a crisis of concern?

One of the key reasons for a focus on feedback is that it is widely accepted to be an important part of learning and it refers to an important part of learners’ lives. It is not some minor feature of students’ experience. They have probably spent more time on their main assignments than on any other aspects of their study. Feedback is the mechanism through which students discover whether they are successful in their work and if they are on track to meet expectations. It is central in their lives as learners. Through feedback teachers communicate what they value and do not value in what students do. It is a personal channel of communication to students about something in which they have typically invested considerable time and effort. Learners care about their work and they care about how it will be judged.

We suggest in this book that there are explanations for what appears to be troubling and that there are many strategies that can considerably enhance the positive impact of feedback on students and their learning. We will show that part of the present ‘crisis’ is that we do not have a sufficiently secure idea of what feedback is for us to consistently use it effectively. There are overlooked features of feedback that need to be considered to make it work, and there are many options for what we can usefully do. We expect that by engaging with this book, readers will be able to see feedback afresh and will never again arrange students’ tasks in the same way. Many of the approaches discussed here do not involve more ongoing effort by teachers, indeed they may end up spending less time marking, or observing performance in situ, but they do require us to take a sober look at what is being achieved through feedback practices and rethink what is of most importance to benefit students.

Why be concerned about feedback now?

More than ever, students are expressing dissatisfaction with feedback in higher education. And more than ever, institutions worldwide are investing resources and time in trying to remedy this ‘problem’. There is a substantial risk in finding a simple solution that may raise student ratings of feedback quality in the short term, but fail to address the underlying problem. So, having teachers label many of the things that they do in normal teaching as ‘feedback’ may increase awareness of the diversity of uses of the term — that it is more than giving comments on written work — but it may also lead to cynicism on the part of both teachers and students that what is important is not improving the quality of feedback, but simply identifying that it may be occurring. The ‘let’s increase our signposting of feedback’ response interprets negative student ratings as a lack of awareness of feedback on their part — that is, a learner deficit, not a problem of teaching and courses. It therefore avoids engagement with substantive educational issues and making decisions about changing teaching, learning and assessment practice. The quick fix misses the underlying problems.

Much of the literature in higher and professional education has focused on the ‘delivery’ of feedback by teachers to students, as if the most important parts of the process are the actions of teachers. This contrasts with the view taken here that the fundamental justification of feedback must be to change what students can do. The acts of teachers need to be judged in the light of their impact on learning. The process of feedback might be prompted by what teachers say or write, but the process is not concluded until action by students occurs. This means a wider perspective must be adopted that includes what happens prior to teacher inputs — briefing, orientation, nature of the task — and what occurs afterwards — responses of students, subsequent attempts at tasks or submission of work, etc. Feedback, in this view, encompasses a far broader group of activities that includes actions by teachers (and others who contribute to feedback) and by students.

This involves not just focusing on what occurs within the conventional framing of feedback, such as improving the quality of comments and ensuring that they reach students in a timely fashion, but reframing the notion of feedback around the effects on students. Feedback thinking then starts with the design of the program or the unit of study, the selection, location and sequencing of tasks, includes the provision of hopefully useful information and the reception and use of this information by students, and ends with both teachers and students seeing the outcome of feedback in improved performance on subsequent tasks. For feedback to be effective, attention needs to be focused more on what occurs before the generation of comments and what occurs afterwards. This is not to say that the comments themselves are not important, but that in isolation from student engagement, they will not be effective. In particular, evidence of effects is needed, not only to ensure that feedback has been done well, but that it has even occurred at all.

It is timely to think further about feedback now not only for these intrinsic reasons, but because higher and professional education is taking place in a rapidly changing context. There is an increase in the numbers and diversity of students, students are drawn from a greater range of educational experiences than ever before, and fewer assumptions can be made about their prior experience and what that equips them to do now. They are being prepared for increasingly diverse forms of practices and workplaces and this is all occurring in an increasingly cost-constrained environment in which personal attention from teachers and supervisors is severely limited. If it was ever possible to base feedback practices on a common set of assumptions about what student work was, it is not possible now.

Finally, we need to attend to feedback now, not just to improve immediate performance of students on their current tasks and educational outcomes, but to build their capacity to use feedback for their own ends. In the world of work, they will typically not have structured processes of learning. Continuing learning in work will require individuals, together with others (peers, consumers, various resources) to take their own initiatives to seek and utilise feedback in settings in which the imperative is productive work, not learning. To do this they will need to be equipped with high levels of self-regulatory ability so they can plan and manage their performance, monitor themselves and utilise all manner of persons and processes to generate what they need to be effective practitioners. The foundation of this needs to be laid from the very start of their courses and reach a very high level by the end so that they can enter the workforce with all that they will need to manage their own learning. A key part of the attainment of this state (learning to trust their self-evaluative capacity) will need to come from feedback processes. So, a key outcome is not just improvement on the performance of tasks now, but on the capacity to better manage subsequent tasks of different kinds. This is the double duty of feedback.

The problems with feedback

Feedback is under scrutiny from many points of view. The problem of feedback is not a singular one. It arises from many different directions and many different dimensions. For an impact to be made, these issues need to be acknowledged and tackled together. The problems we suggest are ones of perception, of shared meaning, of impact on learning, of burdensomeness and of being judged.

Problem of perception

Students believe feedback, however they define it, is done badly and criticise teachers and institutions for this. This has led to instrumental ‘band aid’ solutions to address the problem. These quick-fix solutions assume that there is no real problem, students just need to recognise the extensive and worthwhile feedback that is already widespread in their courses. A typical example reported to us was the remarks of a Pro-Vice-Chancellor who encouraged teachers to signal and underline their use of anything that seemed like feedback on every occasion they could think of. She was reported as saying something along the lines of ‘remember, when commenting in your lecture on the test just completed say to the students that you are giving them feedback’! Regarding feedback as a problem of perception is a good example of the phenomenon of blaming the student: ‘we are doing the right thing, students just don’t seem able to see it’! Teachers are not responding to the feedback delivered by students. Or more correctly, are responding in limited ways that deflect any responsibility for changing their practice.

Problem of shared meaning

Even if both students and teachers acknowledge that there is an issue with feedback, it doesn’t mean that they interpret it in the same way as each other. Indeed, they can have quite different perceptions of what the process involves. This means that changes as seen by teachers may not be seen as an improvement from the student perspective. Adcroft (2011), for example, argues that teachers and students each have their own mythologies of feedback which informs their beliefs, attitudes and behaviours in the feedback process. He suggests that these myths create dissonance as the two groups offer different interpretations of the same feedback events. In his study, students perceive that they receive feedback much less frequently than academics perceive that they give it. Students see the feedback they receive as much less multi-dimensional than do academics and they see marks and written comments on assessed work as much more critical to their learning experience than do academics.

Problem of impact on learning

It is impossible to justify the time and effort spent on feedback if it does not have a positive impact on what learners can do. This implies that the main test of the inputs of teachers and others is not in terms of content or style or timing, but in terms of whether they make a difference to what students can produce. What is termed feedback doesn’t necessarily lead to a positive effect on learning. Commonly it has no effect because information from teachers is not taken up by students and sometimes it is not even read. In other circumstances, for example when students receive overly critical appraisals of their work, it can have a negative impact on learning (Kluger, A. N. and DeNisi, 1996; Hattie and Timperley, 2007).

Problem of burdensomeness

Marking of students' work can have a tendency to take on a routine character. A well-defined range of comments are made year after year on similar tasks. This can lead to teachers believing that marking is a chore and is done mainly for reasons of generating grades. They can have low expectations that it will improve student performance and become disillusioned and disconnected with it and seek to have it undertaken by lowly paid assistants. Feedback cannot be improved in the long term if it is seen as one of the unpleasant side effects of teaching. Making it satisfying for teachers is just as important as making it worthwhile for students.

Problem of being judged

Receiving what are perceived to be judgemental comments from others does not engender a positive disposition and desire to change. Students naturally resist the views of others that they do not like, and particularly resist those that are not seen as respectful or of being in their own best interests.

The fear of judging students too strongly leads to teachers being mealy-mouthed in their comments and creating comments which are indirect and difficult for students to interpret clearly. It also leads to formulaic responses such as the feedback sandwich — a positive comment followed by a negative one and then another positive. Ironically, part of the solution is the removal of judgemental language from feedback. Learners are open to information they see to be useful to them. However, if that information is couched in terms of judgements or in terms of ‘final vocabulary’ which leaves no room for response (Boud 1995), then it is more difficult for them to process it and use it to change what they do. They spend time wrestling with the weight of judgement before getting to the useful information.

It can be seen from this initial analysis of the problematic nature of feedback and how it is interpreted and used, that multifaceted solutions are needed. It is not a matter of adding more to our existing conceptions of feedback, or of necessarily looking for new and interesting ways of providing information to students. This is needed, but we also need a richer conception of what feedback is and a broader notion of its scope.

The major issue in feedback from our perspective is that inappropriate ideas about ‘the activity’ are reinforced by simplistic ideas and misconceptions of what that act is, could be and how it can be effectively utilised. In this book we present the view that feedback constitutes a set of practices, framed by purposeful and dual intentions (to improve immediate work and future work), and nestled within conditions favourable for uptake and use.

What do we mean by feedback?

Feedback, as we are beginning to see, is a slippery term. It is used in an everyday sense within institutions to refer to the making of comments on students’ work. It is seen as a helpful adjunct to grading in which specific points are elaborated and guidance for improvement given to students in addition to the allocation of marks. In this colloquial use of the term feedback, the reporting on work to students in a timely fashion is seen as a necessary attribute of feedback. Indeed, many institutions have rules or guidelines which specify that work needs to be returned within two or three weeks of when it was submitted. In this taken-for-granted sense of the term, feedback may also be given verbally, practically or through electronic media. However it still takes the character of teachers, practitioners or indeed other students providing information about particular work.

As we shall discuss in more detail in the next chapter, this is a very teacher-centric view of feedback. It is one that focuses on the activities of the teacher — writing comments, returning work, discussing work verbally — rather than the activities of the learner — seeking information, responding to comments, incorporating what is learned from them in later work. Given the major shifts that have occurred towards taking a more learner-centric or learning-focused view of teaching and learning in higher education, this residue of a teacher focus appears like a relic of the past. Perhaps an emphasis on what students are expected to do in feedback might help transform a tired practice into one that could generate enthusiasm and meaningful action.

Ironically, such a shift of emphasis is not a radical new departure for feedback, but a return to the origins of the term itself. In Chapter 2 where we look to the disciplinary bases from which the metaphor of feedback has been borrowed, such as biology and engineering, we will see that feedback is characterised by its effects — the changes that occur as a result of the application of information — rather than by the inputs into the process: the output of a circuit is altered by feedback or the temperature of an organism is regulated. A view of feedback that more thoroughly respects the traditions from which it emerged might have a lot to offer in education. Many metaphors are extended beyond their scope of applicability. Conversely, the metaphor of feedback has more to offer than it at first sight appears.

While the idea of feedback is elaborated throughout this book, it is useful to start with a working definition on which we can later build. There are many different variations in the literature, but the one we adopt focuses on the learner rather the those who might provide inputs:

Feedback is a process whereby learners obtain information about their work in order to appreciate the similarities and differences between the appropriate standards for any given work, and the qualities of the work itself, in order to generate improved work.

Some of the features of this definition are

• It centres on learners and what they do, rather than what teachers or other parties others do for them;
• It recognises the importance of external standards applicable to work produced and the need for learners to understand what these are;
• It is a process extended over time and is not a single act of reception of information;
• It sees the appreciation of variation between the standards to be applied and the work itself as an important point of focus;
• It positions feedback as leading to action as a necessary part of the process.

The book

This book takes the view that there is currently poor understanding of what feedback is, and even where such an understanding exists, the consequences are inadequately put into practice. There has b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• 1 What is the problem with feedback?
• 2 Changing conceptions of feedback
• 3 Resituating feedback from the reactive to the proactive
• 4 The impact of emotions in feedback
• 5 Socio-cultural considerations in feedback
• 6 Trust and its role in facilitating dialogic feedback
• 7 Written feedback What is it good for and how can we do it well?
• 8 Feedback in the digital environment
• 9 Feedback in clinical procedural skills simulations
• 10 Implementing multisource feedback
• 11 The role of peers in feedback processes
• 12 Utilising the voice of others The example of consumer-delivered feedback
• 13 Decision-making for feedback
• Index