What students don't make of feedback in higher education: An illustrative study

This paper investigates the way a postgraduate student on an MA TESOL programme at a UK university constructed summative and formative messages from the written feedback she received on her first assignment, and the extent to which those messages corresponded with marker intentions. The study concludes that the participant was able to construct appropriate summative and formative messages with regard to aspects of her written expression such as lexical choice but showed limited ability to construct summative or formative messages from feedback concerned with argument, analysis or task achievement. The study highlights the importance of shared understandings; of making explicit the formative messages embedded within summative feedback; of the need to embrace a conception of feedback as dialogue rather than monologic telling; of issues of power, and of the need to empower students to seek out and negotiate rather than passively receive feedback; and of the need to understand the production and consumption of feedback within a wider context of affordances and constraints.