It is now generally accepted that feedback is a crucial element in the student learning process. It is also the one area of pedagogic practice that causes most angst. Students respond in the NSS across the sector with lower scores and more complaints in the assessment and feedback sections than any others. Tutors perceive that feedback doesn’t work but literature finds that although students are interested in their grades they are also interested in how to improve them (Higgins et al 2002).
As teachers we feed back to students all the time in a range of different ways. We tend to think of feedback solely as the written comments we make on assessed work. While this is to some extent inevitable, given the time-consuming nature of producing this kind of feedback, it nevertheless can disguise all the other ways we and others feed back to students. In other words, feedback is not simply about explaining a grade that has been given on assessed work after the assessment has been completed however much it may seem like this.