ABSTRACT
Higher education teachers are often frustrated by the modest impact feedback has in improving learning. The development of feedback dialogues has been central to many discourses on feedback, including from D. J. Nicol, D. Carless and D. Boud, N. E. Winstone and E. Pitt and Winstone and Carles–as well as in many examples of their other published work. Face-to-face feedback carries with it the additional explanation that comes through body language, facial expression, tone of voice, emphasis and so on. Many others agree that dialogue is essential, indeed, that written feedback from tutors need not to be the only way that students get tutor feedback and that dialogic approaches are much more likely to succeed in helping students make optimal use of feedback. M. Yorke, who pioneered research into student retention in the United Kingdom, proposes several reasons for student non-completion and among these, the lack of formative assessment ranks highly, especially in the early stages of a programme of learning.
