ABSTRACT
The chapter describes, evaluates and advocates an approach to learning and teaching that combines two issues: feedback and enquiry-based learning (EBL). In terms of feedback, the chapter offers an alternative to normal approaches to feedback, which center on individualized comments on a piece of assessed work. There is a broad consensus in both the theory and practice of feedback that, provided feedback is given, received, understood and acted upon, it has a crucial role in the development and enhancement of learning (see, for example, Mutch, 2003; Carless, 2006; Gibbs & Simpson, 2005); as students progress through a program of study, feedback assists them in developing knowledge and skills through the identification of what they did well and badly in each episode of assessment. For feedback to be valuable, it must lead to either a change in learning behavior or the reinforcement of good learning behavior (Adcroft, 2011b). A significant body of literature, however, suggests that feedback often fails to have a positive impact on learning, and this happens for a variety of reasons—usually based on either poor practice such as feedback being too brief, not constructive enough or lacking in specifics (Vardi, 2009) or dissonance in the understanding of feedback between students and academics (Crisp, 2007).
