Reconceptualising feedback as feedforward

Assessment in higher education faces a number of challenges and the provision of feedback is just one of them. Feedback is often viewed by students as lacking concrete advice to improve, not being timely enough or being difficult to interpret. From the staff point of view, feedback is resource-intensive to provide and seemingly not often acted upon.

In this paper, I firstly place the concept of 'feedback as feedforward' within a framework of 'learning-oriented assessment' which also includes two other components: assessment tasks as learning tasks; and student involvement in assessment processes.

I explore some of the differing perceptions of staff and students of the feedback process by drawing on a large-scale questionnaire survey conducted across eight universities and then analysing the issue in more depth though fine-grained data collected from students in a teacher education institute.

I indicate some strategies for narrowing the gap in perceptions between staff and students and share some of my own experiences in trying to provide useful feedback to students.