between responding to individual student needs while meeting the needs of the whole student class. It is suggested that for some lecturers, it may be difficult to remove their own views on feedback (such as positively receiving feedback as a student) and as a result some lecturers find it difficult to relate to students who do not collect their work or respond to feedback, resulting in negative and possibly inaccurate judgements of students’ motivations, poor student–lecturer communication and increased lecturer stress. Perhaps greater reflection is required on the part of the practitioner. Crisp (2007) agrees that providing feedback alone is insufficient and suggests educators should critically reflect on their own practices in providing feedback to students; but it is unclear what these reflections should be. For example one area of reflection may be the amount of feedback to be provided: when is feedback too much or too little? Torrance argues that too much feedback may make learners ‘dependent’ (Torrance, 2007). Equally, Ackerman and Goss (2010) suggest that students may be being given too much and that a greater quantity of feedback can be perceived as negative, in contrast to other research evidence which suggests that students feel that they do not get enough (Handley, Price and Millar, 2008). Some tutors are caught in a web of providing feedback driven by the idea of ‘…writing for more than one reader…’ (Bailey and Garner, 2010) such as monitoring processes or for auditing purposes, rather than feedback being learner-centred. As Price et al suggest a lot of effort is invested in assessment feedback. Unless that effort is well directed, it is unlikely to be worthwhile.
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Feedback and Communication
Related to the notion of feedback being unhelpful and misdirected, this project identified a trend in research that explored feedback as a process of communication, and concentrated on the form and content of written feedback as a method of communication for example the discussion of Rowe and Wood (2008) and Carless (2006). Orsmond and Merry (2011) looks at ‘feedback histories’, where recurring feedback is analysed, and used to develop learning plans as a way of feeding forward into forthcoming work. While this aspect of feedback may be of great interest to practitioners, a manual process of doing this would likely be very time-intensive; there may be opportunities here for development of online technologies to highlight historical feedback. Overall the impression remains that written feedback can be a problematic form of communication, and one with which both staff and students have several problems. In contrast, the literature suggests that there is an increasing focus on dialogical feedback. On the theoretical approach to learning and development Vygotsky (1987) was aware that instruction and development did not coincide; instruction is only useful when it moves ahead of development and, when it does, it impels or awakens a whole series of functions that are in a stage of maturation lying in the zone of Proximal development. Thus in proposing assessment for learning, Gipps (1944) is asking tutors to be aware of instruction and development within the context of the proximal development and self-assessment. Sadler (1989) considered that