This article discusses the importance of dissecting feedback and the student’s interaction with such to determine the benefit provided by specific feedback tools. The authors first establish the importance of conversational feedback, in which students can both understand and reject, if necessary, the feedback offered by their teacher. Such a technique should offer students a semblance of classroom agency, which encourages a partnership between teachers and their students so there exists reciprocity of feedback. The authors then goes on to note that a spectrum of feedback exists (12 types), which should be judiciously used in both evaluative and descriptive manners to evoke the most meaningful conversations from their student body. In varying subjects—which this article displays by offering evidence from STEM, English, and athletic perspectives—students tended to offer different responses after question prompting offered by the teacher. This is, in part, due to the dispositions of the students engaging with the feedback, but those in STEM were noted to respond with fewer words rather than with a dialog. English Studies students, on the other hand, were quicker to note areas of improvement within their work, thus allowing a dialog to flow between teacher the student. Due to the importance of this dialogic element, the authors conclude with the recommendation that feedback typologies cannot be fixed and thus should follow the idiosyncrasies that conversations oftentimes offer. 

Annotation contributed by Christina Wyatt, 2021-2023 CEL Student Scholar