Feedback, Feedforward, or Dialogue?

Abstract

Better feedback is commonly demanded by students and institutions as a way of improving student satisfaction, encouraging more scholarly approaches to assessment, and building students' capacity for self-regulated learning. Student responses to surveys are very clear on what they think makes good feedback: it is prompt, regular, specific, and accurate (e.g. Bols & Wicklow, 2013). Institutional efforts therefore typically try to improve feedback by improving in these four areas. However, Price (2013) has questioned if the customer is always right. This chapter looks at the main models of feedback from the research literature and etymology, in particular how these relate to concepts of self-regulated learning and sustainable assessment (Boud & Molloy, 2013). It is argued that dialogic feedback and feedforward are wrongly currently conceptualised in a purely positive way, which serves to limit effective critique of these models. The chapter ends by describing principles of any type of feedback, providing a working definition which is more compatible with self-regulated learning.