Assessment feedback is widely recognised as central to learning (Black and Wiliam, 1998; Nicol and Macfarlane‐Dick, 2006; Hattie and Timperley, 2007; Shute, 2008). Yet students do not always engage with feedback (Dawson, Carless, and Lee, 2020) or take action on it (Evans, 2013; Postmes et al., 2024; Winstone et al., 2017), rendering teachers’ time investment obsolete. Consequently, a key challenge in feedback research concerns not only what feedback says, but how dialogic feedback moments are intentionally designed to support meaningful engagement.

Traditionally, assessment research has conceptualised feedback as information transmitted from teacher to student, an intervention some describe as monological and transactional (Winstone and Boud, 2019). Popularised by Hattie and Timperley (2007), this framing positions feedback as a message whose effectiveness depends on how it is crafted. With the advent of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), feedback risks becoming further reduced to an input-output model, reinforcing transmission logics in which feedback is treated as data assumed to produce learning gains when consumed (Corbin, Tai and Flenady, 2025; Flenady and Sparrow, 2025).

More recently, feedback has been reconceptualised as a process (Winstone and Carless, 2020), informed by humanist epistemologies and focused on students’ perspectives, self-regulation, and feedback recipience. This shift has foregrounded the design of dialogic feedback moments and led to practical recommendations around feedback literacy for students and teachers (Sutton, 2012; Carless and Boud, 2018; Molloy, Boud and Henderson, 2019). However, this approach has also been critiqued for following a logic of equipment (Biesta, 2007; 2010; 2016), reinforcing individualism (Nieminen and Carless, 2022; Gravett and Carless, 2023), and insufficiently accounting for context (Biesta, 2007).

As Carless (2020) notes, feedback remains “a contested terrain” (p. 426). Despite their differences, both feedback-as-information and feedback-as-process risk reinforcing performative notions of learning focused on outcomes, often at the expense of broader educational purposes such as socialisation and subjectification (Biesta, 2020; 2022). Within these paradigms, feedback is rarely questioned; disengagement or rejection is framed as maladaptive (Boud and Molloy, 2013), reinforcing measurement cultures and the entanglement of feedback with grades (Winstone and Boud, 2022).

While feedback can be transformative, engaging with it is neither neutral nor context-free. Drawing on the stories of eight first-year students, my doctoral research shows that feedback inter- and intra-actions (Barad, 2003) are woven into surrounding assessment cultures and must be understood as socially and materially situated (Gravett, 2022). One guiding research question was: “How do assessment cultures influence students’ engagement with feedback?” This study examines how interrelated layers of assessment culture (from macro and chrono levels to micro and nano levels) shape students’ lived experiences of feedback.

Using a sociomaterial lens, the study connects everyday student-teacher interactions with the broader forces that configure what feedback is, how it is enacted, and how it is received. Sociomateriality reframes educational practices as relational encounters shaped by human and non-human actors, including time, space, artefacts, power, and personal ecologies (Fenwick, Edwards and Sawchuk, 2011). In this view, feedback engagement unfolds within assemblages rather than residing solely within individual students (Gourlay, 2015).

The findings illustrate how assessment cultures shift attention away from individualised explanations of disengagement and toward the conditions under which feedback encounters occur. Students’ engagement is shaped by access to resources such as time, by competing responsibilities, and by whether feedback is experienced as supportive or identity-threatening. Understanding feedback as sociomaterial and culturally situated offers a richer account of how students navigate feedback within complex assessment environments, and why disengagement may sometimes be a rational, situated response rather than a deficit.

The onto-epistemological positioning of the research was informed by critical theory, which is absent in feedback research (Nieminen, Bearman and Tai, 2023), and the theoretical framing was inspired by the work of Gravett (2022) in situating feedback literacies as sociomaterial practices. The study adopted a two-stage, qualitative mixed-method design: Stage one involved 16 students completing a narrative frame (Barkhuizen and Wette, 2008) through an anonymous questionnaire, designed to elicit stories of encountering teacher feedback (Passeport, 2023). Stage two involved in-depth semi-structured interviews with a smaller group of eight students from the stage one sample (three domestic, five international) and integrated the use of photo-elicitation to support participants in visualizing their experiences of teacher feedback. This abstract zooms into the data collected stage two (interviews) which was analysed through thematic coding in NVivo, using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) (Smith, Flowers and Larkin, 2022) which facilitated a close, idiographic examination of the data, representing both the individual accounts and shared experiences.

Examining how undergraduate students experience teacher feedback revealed the influences of students’ contexts-for-(in)action, moving from a cognitive understanding of feedback as a sense-making process requiring feedback literacy skills, to a situated experience informed by the ‘intra-actions’ of various sociomaterial elements. Through the data, feedback talk (Heron et al., 2021) and dialogic course design (Winstone and Carless, 2020) constitute promising ways to deliberately create a new micro-culture that influence students’ uptake positively and sustainably (Carless et al., 2010), and to resist a transmission culture whereby feedback does not land. The results of the study point towards a shift from the logic of effectiveness, homogeneity, and individualism (Biesta, 2007; 2010b; 2016b; Orón Semper and Blasco, 2018; Gourlay, 2019), and towards more relational and embodied approaches that honour plurality and contexts, for more holistic feedback encounters (McLean, Bond and Nicholson, 2014). Relational pedagogies recognise that student engagement with feedback might be inhibited by factors beyond the control of individuals (Gravett, 2022; Gravett and Carless, 2023), and that students’ act by means of their contexts-for-(in)action. The lens of feedback literacies as relational events (Gravett and Carless, 2023) and sociomateriality (Gravett, 2022) can further support the refining of our understanding of feedback encounters, by situating them socially and materially, intertwined with many elements that enter in relationships with one another. People (students, teachers) are not free-floating but entangled with the material in dynamic and ever-changing contexts (Fenwick, Edwards and Sawchuk, 2011; Gourlay, 2015; Gourlay, 2019; Gravett, 2023; Quinn, 2024). This approach recognises that dialogue is not neutral and that contextual elements matter greatly to the feedback encounter (Gravett, 2022; Gravett and Carless, 2023).

Barad, K. (2003) Posthumanist performativity: toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs, 28(3), pp. 801–831. Biesta, G.J.J. (2007) Why “what works” won’t work: evidence-based practice and the democratic deficit in educational research. Educational Theory, 57(1), pp. 1–22. Biesta, G.J.J. (2016) Resisting the seduction of the global education measurement industry. Ethics and Education, 10(3), pp. 348–360. Biesta, G.J.J. (2020) Risking ourselves in education: qualification, socialization, and subjectification revisited. Educational Theory, 70(1), pp. 89–104. Black, P. and Wiliam, D. (1998) Inside the black box: raising standards through classroom assessment. Phi Delta Kappan, 80(2), pp. 139–148. Boud, D. and Molloy, E. (2013) Rethinking models of feedback for learning. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 38(6), pp. 698–712. Carless, D. (2020) Longitudinal perspectives on students’ experiences of feedback. Higher Education Research & Development, 39(3), pp. 425–438. Carless, D. and Boud, D. (2018) The development of student feedback literacy. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 43(8), pp. 1315–1325. Corbin, T., Tai, J.H.-M. and Flenady, G. (2025) Understanding the place and value of GenAI feedback. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, pp. 1–14. Evans, C. (2013) Making sense of assessment feedback in higher education. Review of Educational Research, 83(1), pp. 70–120. Fenwick, T., Edwards, R. and Sawchuk, P. (2011) Emerging approaches to educational research: tracing the sociomaterial. London: Routledge. Gravett, K. (2022) Feedback literacies as sociomaterial practice. Critical Studies in Education, 63(2), pp. 261–274. Gravett, K. and Carless, D. (2023) Feedback literacy-as-event. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 49(2), pp. 142–153. Hattie, J. and Timperley, H. (2007) The power of feedback. Review of Educational Research, 77(1), pp. 81–112. Winstone, N.E. and Boud, D. (2019) Exploring cultures of feedback practice. Higher Education Research & Development, 38(2), pp. 411–425. Winstone, N.E. and Carless, D. (2020) Designing effective feedback processes in higher education. London: Routledge.