education
Introduction
An essential foundation of sociocultural enquiry using a CHAT framework is the exploration of the socio-historical dimensions of the activity system under scrutiny. This is because contemporary activity can only be fully understood as a historically developed phenomenon. This approach is drawn from the Vygotskian notion of the historically mediated nature of human consciousness. Specifically, it is centred on understanding the prospective development of higher mental functionsin material social relations that unfold over time (Scribner, 1985). For Vygotsky, this represented a critical dimension of researching human psychology that is all too often reduced to the mere study of something past and as an atomised phenomenon from present-day activity. Instead, he argued:
To study something historically means to study it in the process of change; that is the dialectical method’s basic demand. To encompass in research the process of a given thing’s development in all its phases and changes – from birth to death – fundamentally means to discover its nature, its essence, for it is only in movement that a body shows what it is (Vygotsky 1978, p. 64-65, original emphasis).
In the later work of Leont’ev, Luria and most recently Engeström, this recognition of a pervasive historicity is broadened to form an essential lens in developing an explanatory analysis of:
how contemporary activity systems have evolved and the layers of history that have shaped their form, artefacts and contradictions
how purposeful collective activity is mediated over time by historically formed tools and artefacts
As Engeström (1999a) argues that much contemporary empirical research using CHAT tends to neglect this critical historical lens. In doing so, it runs the risk of adopting a more relativist and one-dimensional understanding of what is essentially evolving in multi-voiced activity systems. This has effect of limiting the ambitious expectations of CHAT, limiting the depth of its theoretical analysis. This may render it less able to make grounded value judgments about what has productively and negatively affected the emergence of contemporary activity (Engeström, 1999a).
For this reason, to fully consider the contemporary state of student feedback-based evaluation, its complex history needs to be foregrounded as a critical dimension of this analysis. The complex and contesting social forces that have shaped student feedback frame this analysis. This historicity is important, as it can reveal how this activity was formed in the Australian higher education environment and how this worked to shape its contemporary function and primary artefacts. From this sociocultural vantage point, these historical processes around student feedback are understood as ‘dialectic
relationships between continuity and change and the reproduction and transformation of social structures and relationships, underpinned by a complex chronology of
development’ (Ellis et al., 2010, p. 5). The specific form of quantitative survey-based student feedback has not emerged organically. Instead, it is the outcome of a complex socio-historical activity that has engendered in it a defined character. This formation therefore affords important layers of meaning for the research questions foregrounded in this study.
In this chapter, the complex social origins of student feedback-based evaluation in Australian higher education will be systematically considered. By using the CHAT framework outlined in Chapter Three, the changing forms and functions of student feedback will be mapped and critically debated. This will be toward a deeper analysis of the current state of student feedback-based evaluation in Australian higher education. This analysis is commenced in this chapter, and is supplemented by empirical data from the case studies reported in later chapters. This historical exploration will investigate the earliest forms of quantitative student feedback: in early behaviourist experimentation and its subsequent development as a response to student protests and broader
dissatisfaction around educational quality in the United States. From these seminal origins, the chapter will track its initial experimental appearance in Australian higher
education and its early piloting as a response by newly emerging academic development units to the emerging challenges of teaching quality in a growing higher education system. From here, the emergence of student feedback as an early response to the pressures of rapid growth in student numbers and related introduction of student fees in Australian higher education will be analysed. Finally, the transforming pressures of the emergence of market liberalism that sought reframe student feedback as a quality assurance mechanism (and later a public performance measure) is considered.
As observed in Chapter One, student feedback-based evaluation is an accepted orthodoxy in the contemporary landscape of North American, the UK and Australian higher education systems (Harvey, 2003). Yet its emergence is a relatively recent phenomenon, having only been in broad application since the mid-1980s. This is significant as student feedback-based evaluation is considered axiomatic in these contemporary higher education environments. In these higher education environments, it now performs increasingly diverse work as a proxy measure of teaching and curricula quality at an individual, institutional and sectoral level (Blackmore, 2009). Student feedback is generally regarded as a valid and reliable empirical tool for the local, institutional and increasingly sectoral assessment of:
academic performance and curriculum quality
broader academic merit for appointment or promotion assessment and funding of higher education institutions
(Davies et al., 2007).
Therefore, given this powerful social role that student feedback-based evaluation performs in framing the conceptions of current academic practice in Australian higher education, it is useful to critically explore its primary evolutionary phases of student feedback-based evaluation, from:
a) its initial localised and experimental emergence as a teaching improvement tool in established Australian universities
b) its broadened use with pressures for improved student retention and performance, as well as the introduction of quality auditing of student satisfaction levels
c) its subsequent universal application in Australian higher education as a response to rapid system expansion, rising marketisation of and heightened demands of institutional performance management