Exploring the practice of feedback to students

Feedback to students is a vital but relatively underresearched area. An analysis is presented of practice in a complex modular business programme. Attention is drawn to the difficulty of such analysis, but three ways of looking at the text are presented: by modality, by area of concern and by developmental content. A conversational form of feedback with a focus on ‘implied development’ is identified and placed in the context of Bernstein’s notion of an ‘invisible pedagogy’. Such a focus may disadvantage students and the importance of reflection on feedback in the context of knowledge claims at both the module- and the programme level is stressed