Evan’s (2013) systematic review of the literature on assessment feedback in Higher Education identifies four gaps in the field that are significant and relevant to our research:

The paucity of research in the postgraduate sector (Evans 2013: 76);

The lack of focus on how individuals make sense of and use feedback (Evans 2013: 78);

The lack of work on the lecturer perspective on feedback (Evans 2013: 76)

The lack of the affective domain (Evans 2013: 76)

Our objectives for the research were to:

Contribute to a development of knowledge by exploring assessment feedback in the postgraduate sector with a particular focus on the ways in which students make sense of and use feedback;

Seek the student perspective on the kinds of feedback that they find effective;

Explore if and how tutor feedback supports professional and academic learning;

Contribute to wider transnational debates about effective feedback and its contribution to teaching and learning and to the role of practitioner research as a counter-hegemonic strategy;

We are tutors and course leaders for a professional, practice-based, mixed mode Master of Teaching programme at University College London: Institute of Education.   In our professional role there is an increasing concern from tutors to know about the ways in which students understand and act on the feedback they receive and what they feel about this feedback in order to support student learning through feedback (Walters and Turner, forthcoming). Alongside this, within our institution there has been a decrease in turn-around time formarkingand there are institutional suggestions that we move towards providing feedback in the form of tutor selected rubrics in order to provide feedback more promptly.  These moves arise out of institutional desires to respond to student satisfaction surveys and are pressures faced by many tutors and academics internationally, as well as locally, as the increasing emphasis on market forces, competition, costs and accountability become central drivers of policy, practice  and transnational reform(Tremblay et al. 2012; QAA, 2015).  Our intentions were also to create a space for ourselves within the practice – policytension by making use of practitioner research as a methodology, as a politicised act, in order to speak back to power (Craig and Porter, 2014; Hannay, 2011). Our paper becomes not simply a presentation of our findings regarding feedback but an analysis of practitioner research as empowerment: as an opportunity to create a powerful space or voice within the institution (Kim, 2011; Anderson, 2002).

Our research sought answers to the following questions:

• How do postgraduate students make sense of and use feedback? 

• What do Masters students want from feedback?  

• What is effective feedback and what can its contribution be to teaching and learning? 

The dialogic principles of socio-constructivist theories of learning underpin our programme and our research.  Our focus was on the experiences, perceptions and insights of our students.  This required an exploratory approach and an interpretivist analysis of qualitative data.  We have investigated our own practice to better understand student learning and in order to create a space for ourselves within the tension that exists between our pedagogic principles and practices and the transnational reforms noted above.  We explore the use of practitioner research to create local ‘insider’ knowledge as counter-hegemonic knowledge (Anderson, 2002; Kim, 2011) and as a way of speaking back to strong local, national and transnational knowledges, pressures and reforms (Pennycook, 2010). 

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