What’s so new about the ‘new paradigm’ of feedback?

Recent research on feedback in higher education emphasises the active role of students in making sense of feedback and acting on it. This focus on the broader feedback process has been called a ‘new paradigm’, and contrasted with an ‘old paradigm’ in which feedback is viewed more narrowly as just the information provided to students. This paper looks at specific bodies of literature from the twentieth century to evaluate the historical claim that conceptions of feedback have fundamentally changed over recent decades. The findings show that while historically feedback literature did have a focus on the feedback information, all the main elements of the ‘new paradigm’ were present to some degree. In addition, the prominent discussions in the twentieth century of feedback being ‘useful’ or ‘helpful’ also indicate an implicit process-focused approach. The fundamental insight of contemporary feedback research does not seem to be that there is a wider feedback process in which students need to play an active part; it is perhaps that students can actually be helped, encouraged and taught to play that part.