Background: As part of teachers' everyday classroom assessment practice, feedback can be seen as connected to the formative function of assessment, with the aim of helping students in their learning processes. Much research on teacher feedback focuses precisely on the feedback's formative quality. However, in order to strengthen our understanding about the nature of teacher feedback, we also need to understand more about teachers' rationales for giving feedback to their students, especially in primary school settings. Purpose: The present study aimed to explore and conceptualise primary school teachers' rationales for giving students feedback. Sample: Thirteen Swedish primary school teachers (10 women and 3 men) with 4 to 40 years of teaching experience working with students aged 7-9 years-old (grades 1-3), participated in the study. An open sampling procedure was adopted to recruit the teachers. Design and methods: Data were collected using a semi-structured interview approach. We employed a constructivist grounded theory design for the coding and analysis of the transcribed data. Results: Analysis indicated that two main concerns emerged as regulating teachers' assessment practices. These addressed what the teachers perceived as (1) students' academic needs and (2) students' behavioural and emotional needs. According to the findings, the teachers' rationales for giving students feedback were based on those needs, and dependent on factors such as situation, relationships, time and effort. This resulted in a constant comparison and weighing of different needs by the teachers. Some needs were described as prioritised before others, which caused some rationales to be identified as taking precedence over others. Discussion and conclusions: Based on a systematic analysis of -and thus grounded in -interview data from primary teachers, the current qualitative study offers a framework for surveying, understanding and discussing teacher feedback. Overall, the study showed how everyday practices of classroom assessment and classroom management overlapped, thus underlining the importance in teacher education of understanding classroom assessment, classroom management and the relationships between the two.
Teacher feedback can be described as a complex interactional pattern between teacher and student. Formative outcomes of assessment are considered to be enhanced when students understand aims and criteria. In order to better understand the processes of teacher feedback and to improve teaching and classroom assessment, there is a need for research on students' perspectives on feedback. The present study aims to conceptualise how primaryschool students construct meaning from teacher feedback. The study was based on focus group interviews with 23 students in grades 2 and 3 (7-9 years old). Constructivist grounded theory was used throughout the study. According to the findings, primaryschool students conceptualise teacher feedback as communicating a lot of "musts", centred on learning, involving what the students perceived as things they must learn and what they must do in order to learn. These musts concerned both academic learning and behavioural issues, including tensions between different musts.
ARTICLE HISTORY
Feedback is dependent on how it is interpreted and used. The present study aimed to explore Swedish primary-school teachers' and students' shared concerns regarding classroom feedback interaction. 13 teachers and 23 students (7-9 years old) were interviewed. A grounded theory design was employed for coding and analysis. According to the findings, teachers' and students' mutual main concern was to construct clarity regarding what the other communicated. Both strived to construct clarity concerning conditions that they had to adapt to, from aspects as trustworthiness and understanding. The study contributes with an illustration of the relational aspect of classroom feedback in primary school.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.