Feedback and Feed-Forward Strategies

Abstract

There is a growing focus on the key role that assessment plays in learning and we would therefore expect assessment policies and practices to feature strongly in understandings of transitions through taught postgraduate study. The significance of formative feedback in higher education has been widely discussed and our Transitions study has provided further evidence about effective practices in both giving and receiving feedback. If our concern is to reconceptualise feedback strategies so that the direction of travel is towards more sustainable forms, then this requires more attention to be paid to the processes involved in the feedback dynamic between students and tutors. This would comprise a re-formation of feedback practices that does more than address superficial adjustments to academic programmes of study (i.e. timing of feedback, volume of feedback and so on). Substantial changes to the way we understand these practices would need to focus on learner-tutor relationships, roles within the feedback process, effective learning environments and their attributional and affective dimensions. In developing sustainable feedback practices, which are focused on providing support for learners to allow them to develop self-regulatory skills and dispositions, their manageability and their relationship to subject knowledge, needs to be addressed. In this chapter, we will consider key issues in the development of sustainable feedback practices, using Evans’ (2013) Feedback Landscape framework, to explore student and tutor roles within the feedback process and modes of learning to support sustainable practice within productive learning environments.