What Counts as Quality Feedback? Disciplinary Differences in Students’ and Teachers’ Perceptions of Feedback

Abstract

As the literature has shown, students and teachers in different higher education settings often perceive the quality of feedback in varying ways. Recognising that the discipline is important for the way students and teachers perceive teaching and learning in higher education, we assume that the perceived quality of feedback is related to the specific teaching-learning environment in which it is embedded. To that end, we explore in this chapter what students and teachers perceive to be quality feedback in their courses and how these perceptions are related to those of their own teaching-learning environments. We draw on interviews with students and teachers from three different courses that vary in their disciplines and pedagogical approaches. The findings show that the criteria for what counts as quality feedback vary across course contexts and between students and teachers. The differences are related to the importance attributed to certain structural, epistemic, and relational-affective characteristics of the course environment. Based on these findings, we suggest that it is important to develop more context-sensitive ways of evaluating and developing the quality of feedback in higher education.