Perceptions of quality in staff-student written feedback in higher education: a case study

ABSTRACT

This paper reports on the results of an embedded, multiple case study that investigated the views of both lecturers and students on written staff-student feedback in three postgraduate programmes at one UK university. The study sought to uncover how ‘quality written feedback’ is perceived in the higher education environment under investigation. It found that tutors and students were broadly aligned in the features that they identified as constituting quality, which could be categorised within three dimensions: the affective or interpersonal, the orientational and the transformational. The findings suggest that feedback needs to incorporate each of these dimensions if it is to be perceived as being of good quality.

KEYWORDS:

• Quality feedback
• staff-student feedback
• higher education; postgraduate feedback

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Higher Education Academy under the Individual Teaching Development Grant [number GENTDG165].