ABSTRACT
This chapter is aimed at highlighting significant issues related to our understanding and enactment of feedback. It explores key issues that have prevailed in research studies on the definitions, frequency, purpose, form and focus of feedback. The chapter is intended to distill key themes and tease out why there are so many contradictions and confusions inherent in the available research. It offers challenge and critique to some of the prevailing notions, particularly to the dominant discourse of determining notions of feedback effectiveness through meta-analysis. The chapter considers issues of validity as an important dimension to understanding what feedback is for, who it serves and whether its consequences matter. The chapter establishes feedback as a relational concept based on communicative action and interaction. The fundamental arguments underpinning debate about issues of validity mirror some of the contradictions inherent in discussions about feedback. Feedback is a bridge between the past, present, and future and spans a cognitive space between now and next.
