Introduction
Feedback is a topic of hot debate in universities. Everyone agrees that it is important. However, students report a lot of dissatisfaction: they don’t get what they want from the comments they receive on their work and they don’t find it timely. Teaching staff find it burdensome, are concerned that students do not engage with it and wonder whether the effort they put in is worthwhile.
Prompted by concerns from institutions that they are being criticised about their feedback practices, this has led to an explosion of literature about feedback in recent years. While some of these publications are of the “how to do it better” kind, there has been a heartening increase in scholars looking more closely at feedback, undertaking studies about it and generally questioning what it is for and how can it be done more effectively.
The more telling work has focused on critiquing the idea of feedback as we presently know it. Is the way we have been thinking about feedback useful? Is it compatible with the ways feedback is thought of in other disciplines? This has led to a revolution of feedback thinking which has shifted the focus from the quality and timing of the comments educators provide to students about their work, to how students become feedback aware and utilise more effectively the information they receive or help generate.
Feedback is seen as a process that makes a difference to what students do. It does not stop when students’ work is returned to them. Without student action, we cannot meaningfully use the term feedback.
This shift of thinking from a teaching-centred process to a learning-centred one, means we have to look to new ways of thinking about the quality of feedback. No longer should we be solely concerned with the quality of comments made by teachers, but whether these comments, and indeed comments or information from other sources, lead to a positive influence on student learning. Instead of only focusing on the quality of the teacher’s input, we need to consider the quality of the whole process, including the active role of students. The focus must be on: Does it make a difference, and how does it make a difference?
These concerns about identifying the impact of feedback, and how it may be fostered to make a difference to student learning have led to this book.
This book offers the field a new understanding of how we might conceptualise, design for and evaluate the impact of feedback in higher education. While there has been a growing interest in feedback research, there has not been a coherent focus on the impact of feedback on improving outcomes or learning strategies. Clearly, teachers cannot simply provide information and “hope for the best” but, instead, need to carefully design it to have impact on future performance. Importantly, they also need to find ways to understand and measure that impact in order to best support student learning as well as instructional designs. Without this critical bit of information, all feedback no matter how well-intentioned or carefully designed needs to be treated with caution.
The Development of This Book
In this book, leading international researchers across diverse disciplines explore the notion of feedback impact and offer promising directions for both research and practice.
The 28 contributors are drawn from eight nations. They include many of the most influential researchers in the field as well as newly emerging leaders. The contributors in this book have been invited because of their reputation and proven scholarship in the field, and importantly, because their combined contributions promise a coherent but broad scope of methodological and disciplinary contexts that address the distinctive focus of this book.
The editors selectively invited contributors for what they might add to the book. During the writing process, the editors and contributors engaged in several cycles of feedback. Initially, the contributors developed abstracts in response to a description of the purpose of the manuscript and the key conceptual, methodological and practice challenges. The editors then provided comments and recommendations to each writing team with the aim of maintaining a strong focus on the book’s central goal as well as to better ensure key issues are covered.
As a second stage, the contributors worked their ideas into brief papers of around 3000 words. These were then organised into a compendium shared with all authors. At least one author from each writing team then attended a three-day “Feedback that makes a difference” symposium in Prato, Italy. Every participant had read every brief paper prior to the symposium which was then characterised as intellectually robust conversation about the key issues, challenges and opportunities for research and teaching.
Each writing team had the rare experience to engage in a rich dialogue with about their work with a diverse range of scholars in the field. In addition, the participants, including the editors, were able to spend an extended period of time enhancing the coherence and conceptual strength of the book, from vigorously debating definitions through to compiling diverse challenges and opportunities in research and practice. These conversations helped develop a coherent vision throughout the book, but also greatly informed the concluding chapters on research and practice.
Subsequent to the symposium, the contributors reworked their brief papers into full chapters. These were then sent to two other writing teams for peer review. The authors then received two sets of peer-reviewed comments and edits, as well as overarching guidance from one of the editors. The authors then worked with one of the editors in developing their final manuscript.
Structure of This Book
The book has fourteen chapters (not including this one) organised into five parts.
Part I—Feedback That Makes a Difference
This part identifies the critical issues which this book addresses. It brings together the most current thinking and offers new insight into the significant challenges in the field, in terms of research and practice, including policy.
Chapter 2—Identifying Feedback That Has Impact
By Michael Henderson, Rola Ajjawi, David Boud and Elizabeth Molloy
This chapter offers new insight regarding the theoretical, methodological and practical concerns relating to feedback in higher education. It begins with the construction of a new definition of feedback. We explain how feedback is a learner-centred process in which impact is a core feature. The chapter then explores the reasons why identifying, let alone measuring, impact is problematic. We briefly revisit the contingent nature of educational research into cause and effect, and question the implications for feedback processes that are likely to be experienced by individuals in different ways with different effects over different timescales. It is here we then discuss some ways we conceive the various forms of feedback effect including the intentional and unintentional, immediate and delayed, cognitive, affective, motivational, relational and social.
Part II—Expanding Notions of Feedback Impact
The Part II includes chapters that extend current thinking about what we mean by “making a difference” or impact. The dominant conception of feedback is that it should improve student grade outcomes and that it is largely a cognitive process. However, through the chapters in this part we establish that in addition to learning outcomes, we need to also consider the way in which learning strategy, engagement and affect should also be considered as factors that influence outcome as well as being outcomes in themselves.
Chapter 3—Beware the Simple Impact Measure: Learning from the Parallels with Student Engagement
By Joanna Tai, Phillip Dawson, Margaret Bearman and Rola Ajjawi
This chapter argues that researchers must look beyond narrow and simple notions of feedback impact in educational practice. It draws comparisons with what has occurred within student engagement research. This illustrates the challenges of researching a phenomenon that lacks conceptual clarity and hence gives rise to a range of contradictory measures, which promote misaligned research designs, and a focus on what is easy to measure. When feedback is acknowledged as a complex, social process, then the notion of impact itself changes.
Chapter 4—Learners’ Feedback Literacy and the Longer Term: Developing Capacity for Impact
By David Carless
The main focus of this chapter is to analyse implications for short-term and long-term impacts of feedback by drawing on a qualitative longitudinal inquiry into four learners’ experiences of feedback during a five-year undergraduate programme. The student experience of feedback is conceptualised by a 3P Model comprising presage, process and product factors. Learner feedback literacy is a key element spanning these three interactive cycles of the learner experience. Key findings from the study are learners’ wishes for stronger partnerships between teachers and learners in feedback processes and evidence of challenges and possibilities for learner uptake of feedback. The main implications discuss ways of developing practical forms of feedback dialogue and future longitudinal research possibilities.
Chapter 5—Re-conceptualizing Feedback Through a Sociocultural Lens
By Rachelle Esterhazy
This chapter outlines a re-conceptualisation of feedback from a sociocultural perspective. Feedback is conceptualised as a social practice that is enacted together by teachers and students, and that is deeply embedded in the sociocultural context of the given course unit. Whether feedback has an impact depends from this perspective on whether students, teachers and their sociocultural environment interact in productive ways. A three-layer model of feedback practices is presented to describe the relations between the knowledge domain, the course design and the concrete feedback encounters. Based on this model, the chapter outlines practical challenges that might inhibit feedback practices from being productive and how we may plan for productive feedback prac...