Are You Feeding Back or Is It Taking Students Forward?

Abstract

The idea of feedback in education is accepted as vital in students' learning experience as a key to their success. Moreover, there is a growing recognition that for formative assessment practices to be most effective; data produced should be of a type that can help students improve their learning, and so should be dialogic, and feed forward rather than back. That is, students should have the opportunity to be engaged in critical reflection and dialogue about their performance in relation to such data. This chapter, therefore, presents a framework that positions dialogue at the core of formative assessment practices. It aligns this with Boud and Molloy's “Feedback Mark 2” model and Henderson et al.'s 12 conditions of success within the broader field of formative assessment to present a case for a more fine-grained examination of the concepts involved and the need for a change in mindset. The chapter argues that dialogue is the conduit through which nuanced moments and “feed markers” provide indicators of learning progression, and that how this impacts on the design of formative assessment tasks requires greater scrutiny. It concludes that the nuanced humanistic behaviors of the dialogic experience need further definition and exploration within the feedback space, and that the established narrative around the use of “feedback” needs to change to accommodate the social constructivist view of learning if practices are to be enhanced.