Investigating Student Feedback Practices in Higher Education with Practice Theory.

Thesis Proposal by Bente Mosgaard, Senior Lecturer and PhD-fellow.

Supervisors:

Professor Jan Engberg, Department of Business Communication,

Associate professor and Head of Centre Torben Jensen, Centre for Teaching and Learning,

Assessors:

Professor with special responsibilities Anders Buch, Department of Learning and Philosophy,

Aalborg University Copenhagen

Associate professor Carmen Heine, Department of Business Communication

Department of Business Communication, Aarhus University, Denmark, February 2016

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INVESTIGATING STUDENT FEEDBACK PRACTICES IN HIGHER EDUCATION WITH PRACTICE THEORY. 1

1 Introduction 3The importance of feedback right now 3Observed problems 3How can we contribute to improvement? 3Strategy 4Research questions 4

3. Why is it interesting? 4

4. Feedback 5Definitions of feedback 5Feedback and learning theories 6Two perspectives. 7High quality in teacher driven feedback 8High quality in student driven feedback 9Peer feedback, peer assessment and self-regulated learning 10

5. A practice theoretical approach 12Why practice theory? 12Practice 12Material arrangements 12Refuse of dichotomies 13Structure-individual: locus of social phenomena 13Agency and rule following 14Boundaries of practices 14The practical understanding 14Rules 15Teleoaffective structures 16The general understanding 16Change 17The role of language. 17

6 Feedback as asymmetric communication 18Communication is transmission. 18Communication is interaction. 19Communication is transaction. 19Knowledge communication as ‘saying’ 20

7 Methodological concerns 20A synchronic and a diachronic perspective 20Research objects 21Sites and situatedness of research 21Research methods 22

8. Design 23

9. Further plans 24

10 Bibliography 24

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1 Introduction

The importance of feedback right nowFeedback in HE has recently been put on the Danish political agenda as an issue that calls for

attention. Both The Expert Committee on Quality in Higher Education in Denmark, The

Ministry of Higher Education and Science and the students’ organisations have demanded

that Danish universities provide more feedback in their programmes. As a central tool for

research production and thus for the initiation into the metier of the researcher, feedback is

already an integrated part of university instruction, especially in supervision on doctoral and

Master’ thesis, Bachelor’s projects and extended written assignments. Research shows that

feedback is a very useful instrument for learning. We learn faster and more effectively, when

we have a clear sense of how well we are doing against set criteria, and what we might do in

order to improve (Hounsell, 2003). So both the political agenda, current learning theories,

and research based instruction point to feedback as important.

Observed problemsThere is, however, also a paradox to be observed in the feedback practice of the universities.

On one hand, the paradigm of active learning has brought the insight that feedback activities

are necessary to break with instruction characterised by teacher monologues. On the other,

feedback is unfortunately often itself provided as monologue, which retains the students in

the passive role of receiver. Often it is even unknown to the teacher whether written

feedback is actually understood and acted on by the students. Feedback remains therefore in

many cases an untapped potential.

How can we contribute to improvement?Well performed feedback can take many forms, but there is a growing consensus that what

matters most is the process by which feedback is communicated and the role attributed to the

student. The concern is to assure that the students engage in feedback by using the given

information or even by assuming the role as providers of feedback, in order to obtain

evaluative judgement skills. To reach this goal, we need to know what contextual and

perceptual factors contribute to the students’ implementation of feedback. As evidence for

the students’ feedback practice has not yet been produced by research, this is a central task

for the present dissertation.

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StrategyWith the aim of discovering what social factors restrain or promote improvement of the

feedback practice we will

Investigate to what extend and in what formats feedback is included in two study

programmes and

Map students’ feedback practices by carrying out case studies on selected feedback

incidents with consideration of the teacher’s feedback practice as a privileged factor

of influence.

Research questionsThese investigations are intended to answer the overall question of how to engage students

more effectively with feedback: How they engage in feedback and what contextual factors

increase their engagement.

3. Why is it interesting?

This project is interesting for several reasons. First, it is important to investigate the

phenomenon of feedback, because in university pedagogy it is considered one of the most

well-known and important tools for learning (Biggs & Tang, 2011; P. J. Black, Harrison, Lee,

Marshall, & Wiliam, 2003; Gibbs, 1999; Hattie, 2012; Hattie & Timperley, 2007; Hounsell,

2003; Ramsden, 2003), and that is a good reason for exploring how its practice can be

improved.

Second, it is interesting because feedback in instruction of large classes, of which there is a

considerable prevalence in these years – also at the University of Aarhus – represents a

special problem. The literature provides a lot of standards for feedback of high quality when

delivered by the teacher, but these standards are far too time consuming for the teachers of

large classes to reach out for.

Third, the project is interesting, because research until now has not taken the perspective of

the students’ daily life in order to discover the rationality in what they do and say. Data

about what students do with feedback has been collected as interviews and questionnaires,

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limiting the scope of the investigations to what they could and would report (Evans, 2013). A

practice theoretical approach will with an ethnographic lens permit us to get information of

what they actually do and how the complex of contextual factors come into play.

Finally, the core activity within the practice is communication. A special character of this

communication is the knowledge asymmetry between giver and receiver, which is why the

most obvious way to perform it seems to be transmission. Communication across knowledge

asymmetries thus comprise a special challenge for the interlocutors. Theories on knowledge

communication deal with the problem of asymmetry and will therefor be included to

understand the implications of different communicational approaches within feedback.

4. Feedback

Definitions of feedbackHatties defines feedback as pure information “provided by an agent (e.g. teacher, peer, book,

parent, self, experience) regarding aspects of one’s performance or understanding” (Hattie,

2012). But feedback researchers generally agree on the definition of Ramaprasad from 1983,

that sets the classic three steps: “Feedback is information about the gap between the actual

level and the reference level of a system parameter which is used to alter the gap in some

way” (Ramaprasad, 1983). In relation to content, this means that feedback must include

information about the learning goals and standards of the given course (feedup), the actual

level of performance of the student (feedback) and what must be done to approach the criteria

(feedforward) (P. Black & Wiliam, 2009; Hattie & Timperley, 2007; Sadler, 1989; Thurlings,

Vermeulen, Bastiaens, & Stijnen, 2013). Ramaprasad goes further and stresses that in order

for the information to be feedback it must be “used to alter the gap in some way”. Archer

continues the line of Ramaprasad and includes his requirement of use, which gives us a

definition of feedback as not only information, but the whole process: “Effective feedback

may be defined as feedback in which information about previous performance is used to

promote positive and desirable development” (Archer, 2010).

Whether feedback is considered information or process depends also on the learning theory

that lies behind. Below, we will go through 5 the conceptions of feedback from five learning

theories.

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Feedback and learning theoriesConceptions of feedback are following the learning theory adhered to. In an extensive review

of 61 articles on feedback, Thurlings et al found that five learning theories could be

distinguished representing a chronological development of the theoretical notions of learning

(Thurlings et al., 2013). For each learning theory, they show characteristics of effective

feedback.

To behaviourism, feedback is a linear process where focus lies on student behaviour. The

students’ action is directly triggered by the feedback information, which is directive and

corrective. Representatives pointed out are for example Werts et al. (1995) an Scheeler et al.

(2012).

To cognitivism, the focus is the students’ information processing, feedback being information

that provokes the student’s own knowledge building. The feedback process is linear, and

examples of exponents are Kluger and DeNisi (1996) and Ferreira et al (2007).

Social cultural theory is represented by names as Tang and Harrison (2011) and Chi (1996).

Inspired by Vygotski dialogue is seen as leading to zones of proximal development. The

feedback process is still linear, as dialogue is supposed to guide the student.

Three articles are based on meta-cognitivism: Sadler (1989), Nicol and McFarlane-Dick

(2006), and Timperley and Parr (2007) agree that the aim of feedback for the students is to

become self-regulated learners. They are considered subjects in their learning process that

they must learn to monitor, and the feedback process becomes cyclic, as the students on

different stages of their development reach out for feedback. This conviction is supported by

a still increasing field of researchers (Boud, 2000; Boud & Falchikov, 2006; Boud & Molloy,

2013; Carless, Salter, Yang, & Lam, 2011; Hounsell, 2003). In order to become sustainable,

the feedback must teach the students self-judgement (D. Nicol, Thomson, & Breslin, 2014) .

Finally, social constructivists as Black & Wiliam, Hattie & Timperley and many more are

focused on how students learn from feedback. Prior knowledge is the starting point for

learning. They stress the importance of feedback from peers, and of students seeking

feedback from many sources (P. Black & Wiliam, 1998; P. J. Black et al., 2003). The

feedback process is considered cyclic.

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Two perspectives.What we see here is two different approaches to feedback: as a teacher driven activity and as

a student driven activity (Boud & Molloy, 2013). From the point of view of a meta-

cognitivist, the shift in HE learning theories from transmission to social constructivism

happened 20 years ago, but “a parallel shift in relation to formative assessment and feedback

has been slower to emerge, and approaches to feedback have until recently remained

obstinately focused on simple ‘transmission’ perspectives” (D. J. Nicol & Macfarlane‐Dick,

2006).

This first perspective focuses on teacher feedback as a one-way message, and the art consists

therefore in a correct delivery of the information: timely, in an understandable language, and

with detailed and precise suggestions on how to improve. The teacher is in control, because

he knows exactly what he has said or written to the student. Fundamentally, feedback is seen

as transmission in this approach (D. Nicol & David, 2010). The second is more concerned

with the process in which feedback occurs and especially with the role of the student,

considered the subject of his own learning process. In this approach, in order to contribute to

the student’s ability to “independently take responsibility for own professional development

and specialization” (Ministry of Higher Education and Science, 2013), feedback must have a

further impact on learning and foster self-regulation (P. Black & Wiliam, 2009; Eraut, 2006;

Evans, 2013; Hattie & Timperley, 2007; D. Nicol, 2009; D. J. Nicol & Macfarlane‐Dick,

2006).

So when we started out by establishing the contradiction between the active learning

paradigm and the actual feedback practices in the classrooms, this is one explanation: not

only teachers but also researchers have failed to see that the most important feature of good

feedback is what the students do. Nevertheless, the practical difference between the two

perspectives is not necessarily that sharp: As Carless points out, feedback practices can be

seen as a continuum between ‘conventional’ transmission feedback and sustainable feedback

(that we shall come back to). Conventional feedback would often be written feedback on

drafts or final versions of assignments, verbal comments or collective in-class guidance. All

these forms can be enhanced by including the students as co-providers of feedback (Carless et

al., 2011). It is also important to notice that social constructivism and meta-cognitivism

include cognitivist concerns for how students build up their knowledge, the difference is that

they focus on process related and contextual conditions for the knowledge building to

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happen. Finally, meta-cognitivism and social constructivism seem all in all to be two

concerns – aim and process – shared by the same researchers.

We shall now turn to an account of what features are associated with high quality feedback

from the two perspectives, and we will see that they essentially agree on standards in

content.

High quality in teacher driven feedbackSome of the main factors highlighted as contributing to quality in teacher driven feedback are

The use of criteria (feedup)(Ramaprasad, 1983; Sadler, 1989), information about the

student’s current performance against the criteria, the priority to formative feedback (P. Black

& Wiliam, 2009; Hattie & Timperley, 2007; Thurlings et al., 2013), accuracy, (Evans, 2013),

the balance between being sufficiently concrete for the student to be able to apply the

comments and sufficiently general to permit the student to transfer the information for later

assignments (Carless, 2006), the provision of feedback on such an early stage that the student

can actually use it, the ability to express feedback in a language understood by the student

(Carless, 2006), the importance of the tone in which feedback is given (Crisp, 2007) and the

omission of praise of the writer (Hattie, 2012). The list is not exhaustive, although I am

confident that it encompasses the most important factors for high-quality teacher-driven

feedback. Feedback from teachers, however, often lacks these qualities, because they don’t

work as systematically with their teaching as with their research. Another explanation might

be that classes are so big that these criteria, although acknowledged as pertinent, don’t seem

feasible.

However, these quality criteria are connected to conventional feedback, that is information

from teacher to student. Per se, there is nothing wrong with them, as they can make the

message clearer, but the problem is that they do not ensure that the student actually listens,

understands and act on the feedback in the way we want them to. The approach implies the

danger of keeping the student in a comfortable role as information consumer and not as an

active learning subject. The activity remains ‘telling’ and rests on the premise that

transmission of information leads to student action (Boud & Molloy, 2013). This idea comes

from the industrial revolution where the concept of feedback was that a mechanical system

could be regulated through monitoring its output and sending it back to its system to control

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it. In education, this idea of corrective feedback was carried on by teachers, who had the

approach that their job was to inform the students about their performance, and that it was

only up to the students to use this information. Nevertheless, students very often seem unable

to capitalize on offered feedback (Hattie & Timperley, 2007; Price, Handley, Millar, &

O'Donovan, 2010) (Sadler, 1989).

Surveys among undergraduate students studying Politics, History and International Relations

at two British Universities show that also students think about feedback as something the

teacher should do better by reinforcing the communication between teacher and students:

timely and accessible feedback, pre- and post-exam feedback, make it clear when feedback is

provided, embrace a wider range of feedback mechanisms, for example ex audio or e-mail

feedback etc. (Blair, Curtis, Goodwin, & Shields, 2013). None of these requirements can

however ascertain the “indispensable conditions for improvement” (Sadler, 1989), which will

be discussed in the following.

High quality in student driven feedbackNewer research disassociates itself from attempts to sophisticate transmission (Boud, 2000;

Boud & Falchikov, 2006; D. Nicol & David, 2010; D. Nicol et al., 2014; Sadler, 2010) and

focuses instead on the process: “Underpinning our position is the conviction that tinkering

with feedback elements, such as timing and detail, is likely to be insufficient. What is

required is a more fundamental reconceptualization of the feedback process” (Carless et al.,

2011).

The recommandation is to make feedback ‘sustainable’ (Carless et al., 2011) which means

that it must be of “high value” and have an impact “beyond the actual task to which it

relates” (Hounsel 2007 cited in (Carless et al., 2011)). The sustainability is achieved, when

the students have become able to improve their work without their teacher. Requirements for

this to happen are that feedback activities are part of the core module learning activities and

that students are enhanced to generate, interpret and engage with feedback. The process must

include dialogues in which the student can construct his understanding (Boud & Molloy,

2013; D. Nicol & David, 2010; D. J. Nicol & Macfarlane‐Dick, 2006). Dialogue is the tool

that permits students to externalise and qualify that inner dialogue by which they evaluate

themselves all the time (Laurillard, 2005; D. Nicol & David, 2010). Research points at

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interventions and organisation of feedback, where the dialogue between teacher and student

is strengthened. A good example is the University of Westminster: In order to enhance their

use of feedback, first year students use the written comments from their subject tutor on their

assignments to fill out an online self-review questionnaire which generates a further feedback

report to be discussed with the students’ personal tutor (Saunders, 2011). Their tutors closely

follow these students and the results seem to be very good. In Danish faculties of social

science, however, scarce resources make this procedure less likely to become normal. Other

researchers point to peer feedback and peer assessment to be a path to follow. In the

following, we will shortly present what is held to be their advantages.

Peer feedback, peer assessment and self-regulated learningThe rationale for peer feedback and peer assessment is that it permits the students to have an

active role in the process. In that, it is a building brick for students to become self-regulated

learners, defined by Winne and Butler as students monitoring their work using internal and

external feedback as catalysts (Butler & Winne, 1995; Liu & Carless, 2006; D. Nicol, 2014).

Liu and Carless distinguish between peer feedback as “a communication process though

which learners enter into dialogues related to performance and standards and peer assessment

as “students grading the work or performance of their peers using relevant criteria” (Liu &

Carless, 2006). Feedback doesn’t include the official marking, which is the purpose of

assessment. We will for the moment not follow this distinction, as official grading by peers

not seems to be relevant in a Danish context. Whenever students are using criteria to discuss

quality in others’ and their own work, as they are supposed to do when giving feedback, they

are in some way bound to assess.

As advantages of peer feedback in relation to teacher driven feedback it is highlighted that

high quality feedback must be dialogical in order to reach a co-construction of meaning (D.

Nicol & David, 2010). Students claim they better understand their peer than their teacher

(Price et al., 2010; Topping, 1998), and they can get the feedback timely. Feedback from

several peers help the students to see their work from a reader’s perspective (K. Cho, Cho, &

Hacker, 2010; K. Cho & MacArthur, 2010), the variety in the feedback remarks forces the

receiver to choose what seems to be the most relevant to them (Topping, 1998), and they

seem to make more improvements to the quality of their drafts, as when they receive

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feedback from only a single peer or a teacher (K. Cho & MacArthur, 2010). It is easier to

make students use their feedback, because they can hand it in twice (Cartney, 2010).

Furthermore, there is an emerging realisation that there is even more to be gained by

providing feedback to others (K. Cho & MacArthur, 2011; Y. Cho & Cho, 2011). They get to

understand a text from a reader’s perspective, they engage with problem solving, suggest

improvements, and they learn from explaining what makes a text good. Giving high quality

peers feedback implies important cognitive processes: Students compare others’ work with

their own and get new perspectives on the treated issue, which underpins both critical

thinking and reflective capabilities (Cowan, 2010). What they can obtain is what Nicol and

Sadler call ‘evaluative judgement’, the ability to judge about others’ and their own work

using relevant criteria (D. Nicol, 2014; Sadler, 2010).

Studies in the efficiency of feedback however all run into the problem of isolating feedback

within the multifaceted learning environment, and that makes causal relationships difficult to

prove (Price et al., 2010). What we want is to make students work with feedback in ways

that make them learn from it, but asking about what kind of feedback they need, hinders us

from seeing what factors actually make the wanted behaviour logical to them. We must

assume that they deal with feedback in ways they consider being within the norms connected

to that activity. In other words, they carry a practice conditioned by tacit understandings,

norms, rules, skills, knowledge, language, bodies, perceptions, technologies, and time

constraints. If their practice is to change, they need to realise that they are the subjects in their

own learning process. To promote change, we must look at them as agents in a social practice

of feedback emphasising the nature of feedback and the means by which the feedback is

produced, distributed, and received – hence our interest in ‘the practice approach’ (Mutch,

2003; T. R. Schatzki, Cetina, & Savigny, 2001). In her comprehensive review of feedback

research since 2000, Evans also reaches the conclusion that this social dimension requires

attention from research (Evans, 2013).

5. A practice theoretical approach

Why practice theory?To provide a authentically new view on an organizational phenomena such as feedback in

higher education, we want to commit ourselves to a practice-based ontology, i.e. the belief

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that social and organizational phenomena occur within, and are components of the field of

practices (T. R. Schatzki, 2002). Practice theory offers an explanation of organizational

matters in terms of practices and not only a simple registration of them. It explains the

“dynamics of everyday activity, how these are generated, and how they operate with different

contexts and over time” (Feldman and Orlikowski 2011, cited from (Nicolini, 2013)). It is

particularly congruent because it is best applied at the level of relatively small groups

engaged in their everyday activities (Trowler, 2014).

The path we have chosen to follow is that of practice theory in the version of Theodore

Schatzki. With his Site of the Social from 2002, he reintroduced practice as the basic

component of social life and thus became the initiator of ‘the practice turn’. His theory offers

a thorough ontological account of practice, which distinguishes him from many neighbouring

philosophers.

PracticeThis research project is situated within social sciences. As such its empirical object is human

activity broadly speaking. The basic component of social life is a nexus of human activity and

arranged things, a nexus that we call practice. Practice is therefore the basic epistemic

objective of social theory. Practices are “nexuses of human activity, open-ended sets of

doings and sayings, organized by understandings, rules, and teleo-affectivities” (T. Schatzki,

2012b). This means that we look at performances, how people understand them and feel

about them, and what rules they are subject to.

Material arrangementsPractices are furthermore situated in and contingent to material arrangements. They are the

context for the practice and can consist in all sorts of categories different from the practice

itself: buildings, furniture, architecture, communication tools, economy, people and so on.

According to Schatzki, practices bundle with material arrangements through five types of

relation: causality, prefiguration, constitution, intentionality, and intelligibility. Practices can

alter the world, and the material world can set new practices. Material arrangements such as

communication tools prefigure the way exchanges between teachers and students and

between students will happen. The teachers’ organisation of feedback constitutes the

students’ feedback practice, as were it not there, students would not have a feedback practice

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(or would they?). Practices are intentionally connected to arrangements: students have

thoughts and imaginings about the teachers’ comments and perform toward them in specific

ways. Finally, arrangements give meaning for participants in a practice: the teacher’s

coloured handwriting in assignments has a meaning to students that is different from the

teacher’s oral comments, and both are tied to the practice that students carry on with them (T.

Schatzki, 2012a). Accordingly, we will take a contextualist approach to practice, which

means that we consider the context of the practice more influential for its character than other

practices of the same kind.

Refuse of dichotomiesOne of the major points in practice theory is the refuse of dichotomies – between humans and

things and body and mind. Things as for example it-software can play an important role, and

for some post-humanist theorists as Karen Barad (Barad, 2003) and Judith Butler a role just

as important as the one attributed to human beings. Schatzki, though, has kept a humanist

way of thinking and maintains the supremacy of human agency: in every act there is an

individual’s decision. His point is that this decision always is in some way to follow a

practice. The opposition between body and mind is absurd to maintain, as performance is

bound to the body, and as we shall see below, our fundamental way of being in the world is

to perform routinized actions of which it is impossible to point out the author–body or mind.

Structure-individual: locus of social phenomenaWhat is the locus of social phenomena? Theorists like Marx and Bourdieu would maintain

that locus lie in the structures of society: that we can explain social action with the

determinacy of organisational, political, cultural, and economical structures. On the other

hand, individualist theorists like Giddens, Lave and Wenger, would maintain that social

action must be explained on an individual level. To Schatzki, the answer lies in the middle:

the locus of social phenomena is practice: “intermediary constellations of and bundles of

elements (bodies, emotions, things, technology, interaction, use, performance etc.)”.

Agency and rule followingMembers of a practice are considered having agency. But as their decisions about social

action always lead to the following of a rule within a practice, we consider them carriers of

the practice. This idea of rule following is a legacy of Wittgenstein from his Philosophical

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Investigations. Rules do not determine action, because to every rule, there can always be

made one that denies or neutralizes it (Wittgenstein & Anscombe, 1963). To a student, who

receives written feedback comments in an assignment, there is a - possibly tacit - rule saying

that he should read the comments and perform specific actions in order to learn from the

information given to him. Another rule telling him that the weekend has started, and that it is

reasonable to pause from studies until Monday morning, can overrule the first rule. And

Monday morning, he may not find the task that important any more. This second rule of his is

possibly created in contingency with past actions and will probably be in evidence for other

members of the same feedback practice, but not all.

Boundaries of practicesWithin the same practice, members do not act exactly in the same way, but as long as

members recognise other’s actions as part of the practice, they are considered members.

Another way of putting it is to say that what unifies within a practice, is not sameness but

‘family resemblance’ – also a concept from Wittgenstein (Wittgenstein & Anscombe, 1963).

So students can perfectly well react to and perform feedback in different ways, as long as

they recognize each others’ performances as part of a feedback practice.

We have cited Schatzki for saying that practices are “nexuses of human activity, open-ended

sets of doings and sayings, organized by understandings, rules, and teleo-affectivities” (T. R.

Schatzki, 2002). In the following, we will explain the understandings, rules and teleo-

affectivities.

The practical understandingFrom Heidegger, Schatzki holds the idea of ‘everydayness’, the understanding that our being

in the world is structured by a texture of material and social practices that we do not think

about in our everyday life, and that we share more or less with others. Our primary relation to

the world is thus not by way of meaningful representations, but rather through practical

activity. It means that we perform most of our activities as routines without thinking about it,

just like a carpenter uses his hammer. The knowledge of how to do is bound to his body and

has become routinized. That is Heidegger’s idea of ‘Zuhandenheit’ These two notions have

in Schatzki’s analysis become ‘the practical understanding’. Another inspiration for this

thinking is Wittgenstein’s rule-following. As skills underlying activity, the practical

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understanding resembles Bourdieu’s ‘habitus’, the practical sense, and Giddens’ ‘practical

consciousness’. But in contrast to the notions of Giddens and Bourdieu, Schatzki’s ‘practical

understanding’ does not determine what it makes sense for humans to do, it rather executes

the actions that practical intelligibility singles out (T. R. Schatzki, 2002). It is often difficult

for people performing complex practices to express them in words, because they are

normativised and invisible to them, and because they are embodied and involve emotions and

assumptions (Trowler, 2014). This has methodological implications, as we will come back to.

What practical understandings do our students have? As we haven’t made field studies yet, an

example can be taken from it technology: Students that are playing games on their Mac

computers often find pathways on the keyboard for other functions inductively. So when we

ask them how they knew, they don’t have a cognitively consistent answer. Their hands just

know.

RulesIn a practice, people take account of and adhere to the same explicit formulated rules. They

may seem distant to the concrete activity, but they nevertheless have the power to link doings

and sayings in the practice. There is a hierarchy of legislation surrounding the feedback

practice in the faculty of social science: On the national level, The Danish Act on Universities

and The Ministerial Order on Bachelor and Master’s Programmes at Universities, and at

Aarhus University, the current strategies and policies. The purpose of rules is to orient and

determine the course of action of the social agents involved in the practice, but the issue of

feedback is an illustrative example of how few explicit and concrete formal constrains there

actually are to how teaching is performed in Danish universities, as only the university’s

quality assurance policy explicitly mentions feedback: “The students are offered individual or

collective student guidance and feedback on their academic performance with a view to

increasing learning” ("AU's policy for quality assurance in education," 2013). But the

overarching principles of education and the programmes all set goals for the educational

system, goals for which feedback is a necessary pedagogical tool. The student code of

conduct of Aarhus BSS request students to

..contribute to creating a dynamic and inspiring academic environment and thus contribute to fostering a good learning process by demonstrating a high

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level of ambition and assuming co-responsibility for the teaching, learning, group assignments and projects.("Code of conduct for students,")

Although there is no explicit mentioning of feedback processes, the requirements to the

contribution of students are clear: they are supposed to take co-responsibility for the learning.

This rule can have an extensive influence on the students’ practice if the departments make it

visible and enforces it, but local managements are still reluctant to sanction daily social

behaviour of the students.

Teleoaffective structuresA teleoaffective structure is “a range of normativised and hierarchically ordered ends,

projects, and tasks, to varying degrees allied with normativised emotions and even moods”

(T. R. Schatzki, 2002). A practice always displays a range of tasks to do in order to realise

projects with specific ends. As such, it is a teleological structure. The carriers of the practice

perform the tasks and pursue the ends, either because they feel they ought to or because it is

acceptable for them to do so. This is the affective part of the structure. The affection

connected with the practice can vary from one member to another, and between task, project,

and end. Students can perfectly well perform the task of correcting mistakes in their

assignments with a feeling of obligation but without interest in the task. The interest can

however lie in the project of improving their performance with the end of acquiring good

grades. Participants do not even need to be aware of the teleological ends of the tasks they

perform, i.e. what it is that makes sense for them to do their doings. The teleoaffective

structure contains the information of what tasks, project, ends are obligatory or acceptable in

a practice, and what emotions can be connected with them.

The general understandingThe last component of practice organisation is the ‘general understanding’. It can be the

general understanding that participants have of themselves – for examples which role they

think they play in the practice, which role the practice plays in their overall project. Students

can have the general understanding that studying at the university generally is a question of

reading and listening to the professors, but not participating actively. Or they might have the

general understanding that peers are competitors and not valuable dialogical partners. Such

general understandings influence their feedback practice.

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ChangeAs we have indicated, practices are held up through path-dependency, contextual factors and

the rule following of the members. However much this network of factors tends to perpetuate

the practice, following the thinking of Schatzki is stressing that practice also contains

“windows of opportunity”, and that the very role of research is to identify these loci and

forms of change. Human beings are considered carriers of practices and as such agents in

their lives. This strength of agency in Schatzki’s thinking stands in opposition to Bourdieu’s

determination by structures.

Change in practice can emanate from changes in materiality: communication technology has

probably almost everywhere at the university changed feedback practices from handwriting

on paper to digital reviewing, which has had consequences for readability, timeliness,

possibilities for correction, the physical exchange of texts etc. Change can also result from

development of other practices of which the agents are members: if the teaching practice

keeps changing towards more interactional forms, they will possibly be more inclined to see

themselves as active partners also in feedback.

The role of language.There is diversity in practice theorists’ view on the role of language within social and cultural

practices. Theorists like Bourdieu and Schatzki focus on aspects of human activity that they

see as tacit or even inexpressible in language. Thereby they get access to aspects of human

life that remain hidden to those who give primacy to language and articulable thoughts. For

someone like Foucault on the contrary, language is the very tool by which social patterns are

set. Discursive practices is thus seen as instruments of power (Rouse, 2007). In the line of

Schatzki’s conception of practices as fundamentally consisting of doings and sayings, we will

consider language and thereby communication as a subcategory of doings. Communication

being the core activity within feedback, we will need to clarify different teleoaffective

structures in it: how people think communication works, and possible implications of the

distributions of roles or ‘positions’ in its exercise.

6 Feedback as asymmetric communication

Feedback from teacher to student is asymmetrical communication, which is the interest of the

field called Knowledge Communication (KC), within which different approaches cross each

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other in the understanding of this specific kind of communication. Three perspectives are

treated: construction of knowledge, representation of knowledge, and communication of

knowledge (e.g. interaction, sociology, setting), the latter being in focus in this discussion.

The purpose of the following section is to discuss its relevance for investigating the

communication of written feedback in HE. To this end I will use Peter Kastberg’s Knowledge

communication – the emergence of a third order discipline (Kastberg, 2007). Kastberg

suggests the following definition:

Knowledge communication is strategic communication. As ‘strategic’ it is deliberately goal-oriented, the goal being the mediation of understanding across knowledge asymmetries. As ‘communication’ it is participative (interactive), and the communicative ‘positions’ converge on the (co)-construction of (specialized) knowledge (Kastberg, 2007, 2010).

Before discussing the benefit of conceiving feedback as knowledge communication, we will

need to create an overview over three paradigms in communication science that has also

influenced research on pedagogy in general and on feedback.

Communication is transmission. In this first conception, communication is seen as a means to transmit information from a

sender to a receiver with the purpose of providing information or provoking an action.

Meaning is contained in the message or text itself and neither the channel nor the receiver has

any influence on the meaning. What is sent is supposed to be the same as what is received.

Claude Shannon’s communication model from 1948 is the most well known example.

Conceived for solving problems in computing and telephone exchanges, the semantic aspects

of communication were seen as irrelevant to the engineering problem (Lanigan, 2013).

Nevertheless, the model was received enthusiastically by social scientists, including Roman

Jakobson, to become a model for human communication. With Roman Jacobson’s theory

from 1958, the addresser is the embodied origin of communication and as such no longer a

mechanical ‘sender’. He sends a text (message) that refers to something outside the text

(context). The addressee being a human being, he will interpret the message. The message

itself does not change, but there is awareness that it may be understood in a different way

than intended. In this first paradigm communication is “a matter of ‘the sender’ sending”

(Kastberg, 2007). In a feedback process where this is the way the teacher understands

communication, he would correct the writings of his students and hand the corrected

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assignments back to them in the hope that they will understand his comments and act

appropriately on them. This is how much feedback is actually performed in HE.

Communication is interaction. In the second paradigm human communication occurs when the receiver responds to the

sender by giving feedback. Communication is seen as action-reaction, and the sender will

therefore be able to adjust his message according to the information given by the receiver

(Windahl, Signitzer, & Olson, 2009). In this paradigm communication is a matter of “‘the

sender’ adjusting to feedback from the ‘receiver’ and/or the environment” (Kastberg, 2007).

Understood in the context of feedback, the teacher would hand corrected assignment drafts to

the students who would then hand in the final version of their assignments. This is also an

appreciated model for feedback that can be found in HE, by some called process writing.

Communication is transaction. In the third paradigm communication is understood as a project involving equally both

‘sender’ and ‘receiver’. The meaning of the message is discursively co-constructed in the

interaction between the two positions that are no longer thought of as ‘sender’ and ‘receiver’.

Consequently, this communication cannot be a matter of ‘the sender’. Both positions will

have the other in mind in order to achieve a mutual understanding. The transaction paradigm

seems to be to the most adequate illustration of how real-life communication is understood to

work, if the communication is to be successful. It fits very well the collaboration between

students, when they write papers together and when they give each other feedback.

Between teacher and students there is, however, an asymmetrical relation, in that the teacher

is thought of as the expert, and that the distribution of roles between the two positions makes

them carriers of two different practices with different contextual conditions and motivations

for the reaching for a mutual understanding. This is why feedback can be thought of as

knowledge communication, the conception of communication that investigates the possibility

of transaction in spite of expert-layman asymmetries, but also as a context-dependent process

or practice, influenced by the social environment, artefacts, the brain, and the body (Risku,

Mayr, Windhagen, & Smuc, 2011).

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Knowledge communication as ‘saying’To understand feedback as communication puts the focus on the impact of the sociological

context in the creation of meaning. For teachers and students to be aware about whether they

think of, organize, and receive feedback as transmission, interaction or transaction is fruitful,

because it forces them to reflect on processes: how the knowledge in question is supposed to

become knowledge for the students, how the students are meant to participate in the process

and how the teachers can assure that a conceptual convergence has taken place. To

understand feedback as knowledge communication is acknowledging that the urge for

resorting to just “telling” and just “receiving” is a pitfall caused by an asymmetry that must

be overcome.

7 Methodological concerns

A synchronic and a diachronic perspectiveConducting empirical research on a practice theoretical ground implies attention to a

multitude of social phenomena. First of all, to grasp the contemporaneous condition of

particular doings and sayings in their material arrangements, an ethnographic approach with

observation and conversations with participants is required. “There is no alternative to

hanging out with, joining in with, talking to and watching, and getting together the people

concerned” (T. Schatzki, 2012a). Furthermore, the historical dimension is important, because

bundles tend to persist. And with insights in the organisations and time-spaces of the bundles

experienced by participants over a period of time, we are better equipped to understand the

features of the actual practice. Oral history is therefore another important empirical

approach. The purpose of theorising with practice theory is to get a « true » picture of reality,

rather than a representation of it. This has implications for both the methodology and the

responsibility of the researcher.

Research objectsTo get a true picture, we must develop a sensitizing framework that captures performances as

well as tacit knowledge, emotions, bodily behaviour and materiality (Reckwitz, 2002).

Discourse and language loose their priority as they are considered only as one type of

performances among others. In feedback practice, however, language – or more exactly

communication – is the core activity, which makes it pertinent for us to pay a special

20

attention to. It is, what communication does to the sender and the receiver, that we must take

interest in.

Performances are, what Sven Brinkman calls ‘the everyday life’: “en masse rutinemæssige

aktiviteter, private og offentlige, der udføres regelmæssigt, om ikke ligefrem dagligt: såsom

at spise, sove, arbejde, pendle, købe ind og så videre” (Brinkmann, 2013). To us, the centre of

interest is not the patterns of behaviour, but the normativity lying behind: how do students do

to live up to the norms of the others? What is the teleoaffective structure of the

performances?

Sites and situatedness of researchPractices unfold in sites. The site is where something is or takes place (T. R. Schatzki, 2002).

The researcher is the one to define the site, as there is no explicit structure in social life. In

our case, the site will be the learning environment of the students: their time schedule,

curricula, set learning activities, class size, organisation of study groups, teachers, peers,

buildings, classrooms, use of information technology, but also leisure activities like sports

and jobs, housing conditions, friends and partners. Because of the contextual contingency of

practices, we cannot allow ourselves to ignore the complexity of the learning environment. It

is also the very character of qualitative research to be situated and to localize the observer in

the world (Brinkmann, 2013). It has the implication that generalisations cannot be made, but

with ethnographic ‘thick descriptions’ (Geertz, 1973) of not only what can be observed

physically but also meaning - the teleological and affective structures behind performativity,

others can gain knowledge from the research, if there are also thorough descriptions of

methods.

Research methodsA practice theoretical approach expects the researcher to be open towards his research object.

We will therefor reach out for naturalistic observation (data collected in their natural setting

(Adler, Forbes, & Willmott, 2007)) without predetermined categories. The observer is

supposed to intervene as little as possible in order not to influence the participants.

Against this methodological position, we must argue that the observer’s perception always

will be selective and often there will be contamination of the data by the Rosenthal effect

21

(Harboe, 2011). Also Collingwood in his An Essay on Metaphysics argues against the idea

that it is possible to observe facts with the senses and classify them by use of logical

thoughts. Facts are not just out there, they are in fact made by humans (Moses & Knutsen,

2012). His view was very much in line with Karl Popper who claimed three things: (1) That

observation always requires “a chosen object, a definite task, an interest, a point of view, a

problem”, (2) that description presupposes a descriptive language with words, chosen by the

observer and (3) that the observer’s presuppositions are formed by his interests and needs

(Moses & Knutsen, 2012). Adler and Adler also point out, that establishing an insider’s

perspective requires an interaction with the participants that is close enough to create

familiarity without participating in the activities that constitute the core of group

membership. Adler and Adler name this role ‘the peripheral-member-researcher’ (Adler et

al., 2007). We will therefor need to find a balance between objectivity and familiarity with

the students in the study. We shall also follow Trowler’s recommendation of hybrid methods,

i.e. the combination of two or more approaches.

When investigating what happens when students receive written feedback, the special sort of

observation called ‘think-aloud’ will be used. The research person is instructed to read aloud

the comments made by the feedback’er and to say how he understands the comments and

what he intends to do as a consequence of them. The method has within psychology and

educational research been proven as valuable for exploring individuals’ thought processes,

especially when combined with other methods in triangulation (Charters, 2010). In our

research, as we cannot follow the students in question all the time, we need accounts of what

they understand and what they intend to do with the feedback, if they do not act promptly.

The method stated useful for revealing the inner voice of a person, we may get access to tasks

carried out on the basis of practical understanding. But as this method bears the risk of

contamination by the presence of the observer, a third method will be applied.

Whereas observation can cast a light on everything that is visible, we need still another

method to uncover “the taken-for-granted” (Trowler, 2014). We will therefor combine

observation with a projective technique (Trowler, 2014), proposed by Nicolini, who calls it

‘the interview to the double’: interviewees must imagine that they have a double who will

have to show up in the classroom next day instead of them. They must provide instructions

in such details that their true identity is not unveiled. In this way, we can get hold of the

22

practitioners’ concerns and the “instructions” that they must learn in order to produce conduct

that is acceptable in the practice.

The last comment on methods will concern Nicolini’s “zooming in and zooming out”: the

above mentioned research methods will serve to zoom in on the feedback practice of the

students. This must be combined with repeated sessions of zooming out to other more global

practices: What are the connections between practices? How does the feedback practice

contribute to the wider picture of student self-regulation? Where are the possibilities for

change? (Nicolini, 2013).

8. Design

Two study programmes in the Aarhus School of Business will through interviews with the

heads of studies and key teachers investigate to what extend and in what formats feedback is

included in two study programmes. This is to get an overview over the organisation of

feedback from the perspective of the teaching staff.

In two or three courses representing different paradigms of communication, students’

feedback practices will be investigated through case studies on selected feedback incidents

with consideration of the teacher’s feedback practice as a privileged factor of influence.

The case study will include:

Teacher feedback:

1. Observation: Interview with teachers on the organisation of feedback in their course.

Reading of teacher feedback and think-aloud with 6-8 students

2. Interview with the double for triangulation with the same 6-8 students

Peer feedback:

1. Observation: Interview with teachers on the organisation of feedback in their course.

Observation of peers providing feedback to each others. 6-8 students in two or three

groups.

2. Interview with the double for triangulation with the same 6-8 students.

23

Think-alouds and interviews with the double will be videotaped. The data will be codified

and analysed with the help of NVivo.

Finally, we will discuss the observations with the students – hopefully in focus groups - with

the double purpose of correcting possible misunderstandings of the researcher and pointing at

possibilities of change for the students.

9. Further plans

Spring 2016: collection of data and analysis

Automn 2016: collection of data and analysis

Phd.-course in the use of Nvivo

Spring 2017: analysis and article writing

Research environment change

Automn 2017: analysis and article writing (1)

Spring 2018: analysis and article writing (2)

Automn 2018: analysis and article writing (3)

The last 5 ECTS course has not yet been decided for. I await directions from the Phd-

programme.

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