Resituating feedback from the reactive to the proactive

In higher education, the word feedback inevitably conjures up a situation of ‘production’ and the delivery of a ‘response’: the student produces an assignment and the teacher delivers comments. The premise underpinning this chapter is not in itself original, but it needs to be stated at the outset: In any feedback situation, the responding agent is never just the teacher. A view that restricts feedback agency to the teacher ignores the active role of the learner and the ubiquity of inner feedback processes. Learners are always generating internal feedback when they produce a piece of work, even in the absence of a teacher. This inner feedback is a by-product of task engagement; it derives from the learner’s inner monitoring and evaluation of discrepancies between current and intended performance, the latter determined by some mix of students’ own goals and what they think the teacher is looking for. And when external feedback is provided it does not operate alone, it will trigger and also add to learner-generated feedback, at times conrming, supplementing or conicting with it. For the most part, research on feedback has ignored the complexity of these inner mental processes, although there are some notable exceptions (Butler and Winne, 1995). This chapter draws together some ideas to address this gap. It reviews feedback from a cognitive perspective and suggests ways of harnessing and strengthening inner feedback processes. It also identies some limitations with current feedback research. In this chapter, it is assumed that the purpose of feedback in higher education is to develop the students’ capacity to make evaluative judgements both about their own work and that of others. This is a position shared by some assessment researchers (Boud, 2007; Cowan, 2010; Sadler, 2010) and it is also consistent with my earlier papers where I stated that feedback should serve the function of progressively enabling students to better monitor, evaluate and regulate their own learning independently of their teachers (Nicol and Macfarlane-Dick, 2006; Nicol, 2009). Both making evaluative judgements and evaluating and monitoring one’s own learning rely on internal feedback processes, and are activities that students must learn to do for themselves. The question addressed here is how we can enhance students’ skills in this area.