The challenges of feedback in higher education
By Michael Henderson, Tracii Ryan, Michael Phillips. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 2019
273 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract Assessment feedback is one of the most important components of the learning process. However, student and educator dissatisfaction with feedback practices continues to remain a significant problem in higher education. To better understand the barriers to effective feedback, the present study explores feedback challenges identified by 3807 students and 281 educators from two Australian universities. Open-response data were analysed using an inductively derived coding framework and thematic analysis. The findings reveal three major themes relating to the challenges of feedback from the perspective of students and educators: feedback practices, contextual constraints and individual capacity. In addition to confirming the persistence of many previously reported challenges in the literature, this paper also offers insights into challenges that are particular to feedback, especially relating to the production of useful comments and the perceived hurdles of both student and educator attitudes and capabilities. The findings also highlight the constrained nature of educators’ work, particularly in relation to time. While further research is needed, we propose that feedback needs to be understood as an interaction between practices, context and individuals.
Subfields: Education
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4ad70b58d682c3cc98418e390ae8319051e1fc3c
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Education
- David Boud
- Phillip Dawson
- N. Winstone
- Michael Henderson
- Elizabeth Molloy
- Tracii Ryan
- Michael Phillips
- Paige Mahoney
Citations in the corpus
- Artificial Intelligence for Assessment and Feedback to Enhance Student Success in Higher Education (2022, unknown): “Reference [77] adopted a socioecological approach for understanding feedback practices.”
- The need to disentangle assessment and feedback in higher education (2020, background): “In the recent literature, there have been renewed calls for the importance of feedback having a design focus in its own right, beyond simply following on from however assessment has been designed (Boud & Molloy, 2013; Henderson et al., 2019a; Winstone & Carless, 2019).”
- The usefulness of feedback (2019, background): “…for example, personal preferences of educators in relation to style or formatting of written work (Rand, 2017), unclear language that is designed to mitigate criticism (Hyland and Hyland, 2001) and comments that are indirect, vague or unconstructive (Henderson et al., 2019; Zhang and Zheng, 2018).”