Researching feedback dialogue: an interactional analysis approach

Abstract

A variety of understandings of feedback exist in the literature, which can broadly be categorised as cognitivist information transmission and socio-constructivist. Understanding feedback as information transmission or ‘telling’ has until recently been dominant. However, a socio-constructivist perspective of feedback posits that feedback should be dialogic and help to develop students’ ability to monitor, evaluate and regulate their learning. This paper is positioned as part of the shift away from seeing feedback as input, to exploring feedback as a dialogical process focusing on effects, through presenting an innovative methodological approach to analysing feedback dialogues in situ. Interactional analysis adopts the premise that artefacts and technologies set up a social field, where understanding human–human and human–material activities and interactions is important. The paper suggests that this systematic approach to analysing dialogic feedback can enable insight into previously undocumented aspects of feedback, such as the interactional features that promote and sustain feedback dialogue. The paper discusses methodological issues in such analyses and implications for research on feedback.

Keywords:

• feedback
• dialogue
• interactional analysis
• methodology
• qualitative research

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge Jisc for their funding of the interACT project which spurred this work. We also appreciate the students and staff at the Centre for Medical Education who took part in the study and Phill Dawson of Deakin University for his comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Rola Ajjawi is a part-time tutor at the Centre for Medical Education at the University of Dundee, UK. She was a senior lecturer and the deputy director of the postgraduate medical education programmes at Dundee. Her research interests encompass assessment for learning, workplace learning and technology enhanced learning. She has published over 50 peer-reviewed articles, books and book chapters across a range of journals and is the deputy editor of the journal Medical Education.

David Boud is the director of the Centre for Research in Assessment and Digital Learning, Deakin University, Melbourne. He is also Emeritus Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology Sydney and a research professor in the Institute for Work-Based Learning, Middlesex University, London.

Additional information

Funding

This work was done by Joint Information Systems Committee [grant number 5/11 – Assessment and Feedback Programme].