From Feedback Delivery to Feedback Use: A Critical Review with Implications for Accounting Education

Abstract

Evidence that assessment comments have been returned is not, by itself, evidence that students have used them or learned from them. This distinction is established in feedback scholarship, but it creates a practical problem for educators deciding what an evaluation can reasonably claim. This critical review brings selected higher education feedback research into dialogue with accounting education studies and public UK quality guidance. A purposive, publicly accessible literature base is used to distinguish four objects of evaluation: provision of feedback information, opportunity to engage with it, enactment of a response, and subsequent learning. The analysis examines the inferential limits of turnaround measures, satisfaction surveys, records of engagement, revisions and assessment performance. Accounting-related studies illustrate why favourable student experiences and improvements in learning must be reported separately. A proposed claim-evidence framework connects these distinctions to hypothetical numerical, interpretive and collaborative accounting tasks. The framework is neither a validated instrument nor a universal sequence of learning; it accommodates feedback generated through comparison without teacher comments. The paper contributes a bounded synthesis and an applied evaluation approach, not a new theory of feedback or evidence about any particular provider. It concludes that proportionate evaluation should match evidence to the claim being made while preserving student agency and acknowledging uncertainty.