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HE institutions persistently seek to increase student engagement and satisfaction with assessment feedback, but with limited success. This study identifies the attributes of good feedback from the perspective of recipients. In a distinctive participatory research design, student participants were invited to bring along actual examples of feedback that they perceived as either 'good' or 'bad' to 32 interviews with student researchers. Findings highlight the complex interdependency and contextual nature of key influences on students' perspectives. The feedback artefact itself, its place in assessment and feedback design, relationships of the learner with peers and tutors, and students' assessment literacy all affect students' perspectives. We conclude that standardising the technical aspects of feedback, such as the feedback artefact or the timing or medium of its delivery is insufficient: a broader consideration of all key domains of influence is needed to genuinely increase student engagement and satisfaction with feedback.

This paper explores assessment experiences of undergraduates studying across disciplines. Within a participatory research design, students as researchers were involved in data collection and interpretation. The student lens is brought to bear on the experiences of academically successful final-year students and their strategies for negotiating assessment across disciplinary departments. Findings highlight perceptions of invisibility, academic homelessness and disadvantage despite participants' high academic achievement. These successful students viewed the divergent disciplinary approaches to assessment they encountered as legitimate but felt challenged and disadvantaged by their diversity. Findings are discussed within a framing of assessment practice as socially situated and embedded in the educational values and epistemologies of learning communities, thus problematising development of student assessment literacy across disciplinary communities. The paper concludes that it is neither feasible nor educationally valuable to iron out divergence but more intentional ways of revealing and sharing different epistemological positions in assessment practice could mitigate challenges.