Innovative Assessment Feedback Practices in Higher Education: A Path Towards Building Learning Circles or Just Closing the Feedback Gap?

Considered a vital aspect of learning, feedback is usually a common element in instructional practice. In higher education, assessment feedback has been found to lack the ability to impact student learning. Therefore, recent feedback literature has stressed a change in practice to address this issue. This review examines the extent to which innovative assessment feedback practices succeed in engaging undergraduate students to use the feedback they receive. Findings indicate that making assessment feedback a dialogic, reiterative process that provides opportunities for reflection and interaction with peers can enable adaptive engagement and promote mastery learning. However, most of these affordances revolve around designing effective learning-oriented assessment tasks. Further research is needed to provide evidence of any long-term impact of learner-centered feedback practices