Feedback Interchange in Small-Group Discussion: An Interpretive Review of the Literature
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Abstract
The concern of this paper is with small-group discussion in university teaching as a site where feedback is typically generated and communicated to humanities and social sciences students on their everyday learning. The theme is explored by means of a wide-ranging review of the salient literature, considered afresh through the lens of feedback, and against the backcloth of an ongoing transformation in how feedback in higher education is understood, investigated and practised. It concludes that, in contrast to feedback on graded students' assessments, feedback in small-group discussion is characteristically embedded in real-time teaching-learning interchanges, verbally expressed, generated by student peers as well as by the tutor and, since it is on open display, offers opportunities for vicarious learning. It is also a crucial milieu in which students can practise and be guided towards discursive verbal fluency in discipline-specific meaning-making. Nonetheless, the feedback potential of learning through discussion is often unrealised, and robust evidence is lacking of its impact on the quality of learning over time.
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