'Enhancing feedback practices within PhD supervision: a qualitative framework synthesis of the literature' by Margaret Bearman, Joanna Tai, Michael Henderson, Rachelle Esterhazy, Paige Mahoney and Elizabeth Molloy in (2024) Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education comments
PhD candidates, like all students, learn through engaging with feedback. However, there is limited understanding of how feedback strategies support doctoral candidates. This qualitative framework synthesis of 86 papers analysed rich qualitative data about feedback within PhD supervision. Our synthesis, informed by sociomateriality and a dialogic, sense-making view of feedback, underscores the critical role that feedback plays in doctoral supervision. Supervisors, through their engagement or disengagement with feedback, controlled candidates’ access to tacit and explicit standards. The ephemeral and generative nature of verbal feedback dialogues contrasted with concrete textual comments. While many supervisors aimed for candidates to become less reliant on feedback over time, this did not necessarily translate to practice. Our findings suggest that balancing power dynamics might be achieved through focussing on feedback materials and practices rather than supervisor-candidate relationships.
Professional and personal crises are common among doctoral candidates (Katz 2018) and experiences with feedback may be part of the problem (Engebretson et al. 2008). Feedback is a process that enables university students to gauge their progress, direct their efforts and participate in academic debate. Multiple meta-analyses suggest it has highly positive effects on learning (Hattie and Timperley 2007; Wisniewski, Zierer, and Hattie 2019). However, while feedback and feedback research holds a prominent position in the higher education literature, its role in the PhD experience is considerably less studied (Chugh, Macht, and Harreveld 2021). For many in doctoral education, feedback may be seen as a pedagogical technique that primarily pertains to written work. However, feedback can be defined as a broader process where the learner makes sense of, and acts upon, useful information about their work (Henderson et al. 2019). From this perspective, feedback is embedded within doctoral supervision. Feedback strategies may therefore need to take account of the intense interpersonal nature of doctoral studies, where the supervisor-candidate relationships span years rather than months. By examining how feedback manifests within supervisory contexts, which are dynamic, socially bound and intensely interpersonal, we can infer feedback strategies that enhance doctoral supervision.
Many publications examine PhD supervision but feedback tends to be given cursory attention. Indeed, Chugh, Macht, and Harreveld (2021) recent narrative review suggests that feedback is rarely a focus of doctoral studies research. Their analysis focusses on practical feedback strategies for doctoral supervisors such as: developing a ‘positive supervisory relationship’, articulating ‘suitable feedback content’ and finding ‘suitable and balanced ways of giving feedback’ (689). However, doctoral education is equally as enmeshed with interpersonal relationships, institutional strategies and academic power structures as it is with educational practices (Bastalich 2017). Indeed, feedback within doctoral supervision can be understood as an entree to broader academic practices (Carless, Jung, and Li 2023). Therefore, we build on Chugh, Macht, and Harreveld’s (2021) review by employing a formal qualitative synthesis, which gathers together ‘analytical depth and contextualised detail’ (Pope, Mays, and Popay 2007, 78) from qualitative studies, to discern the distinctive nature of feedback practices in PhD supervision within the existing literature.
We adopt two conceptual underpinnings. We regard feedback as primarily a formative development process and therefore emphasise a facilitative and dialogic approach (Evans 2013). Boud and Molloy (2013) differentiation of feedback designs—by their focus on teacher or learner—can provide useful insights. In a teacher-focussed design, feedback is concerned with how the teacher constructs messages that are timely, evaluative and help students to better complete the next task. However, this overlooks the need for a student to respond to this information. Student-oriented perspectives of feedback encompass how students access and make meaning of messages (from teacher, self and peers) in order to better complete the next related task. This latter view is exemplified by the definition of feedback as ‘a process in which learners make sense of information about their performance and use it to enhance the quality of their work or learning strategies’ (Henderson et al. 2019, 1402).
Our second conceptual frame acknowledges that feedback takes place within the complex social world of doctoral studies. Therefore, we adopt a sociomaterial approach. This perspective regards learning as constituted within situated social interactions but also acknowledges the contributions of materials, including objects and places. A sociomaterial view of feedback encompasses the interactions between the learner, the teacher, the objects they produce and the spaces they inhabit and change (Gravett 2020). Thus doctoral supervision can be seen as a dynamic interplay between teachers, learners, objects and places, which emerge across time and space (Fenwick, Nerland, and Jensen 2012).
These two frameworks highlight the distinctive nature of this review, which provides an in-depth qualitative analysis to provide insights into the dialogic, relational, contextual and temporal nature of feedback practices in doctoral supervision.
