Mediating Factors in the Provision of Lecturers’ Written Feedback to Postgraduate Taught Students

This paper reports on research that investigated the factors mediating written feedback provision by lecturers teaching on three postgraduate taught programmes at a university in the UK. The study adopted a case study approach, with the postgraduate programmes as the cases. Lecturers participated in background and stimulated recall interviews, with their authentic written feedback used as the stimulus. The study identified multiple mediating factors that impacted on the staff members’ feedback processes. These could be separated into three main categories: experiential, social and environmental. The mediators indicated that written feedback in higher education may serve multiple simultaneous goals that relate not only to student learning but also to lecturers’ perceptions of their roles and function within the broader institutional context.