Class Size and the Erosion of Written Feedback Quality: A Dual-Perspective Qualitative Study of Teachers and Students in Overcrowded Classrooms

Abstract

Written feedback survives almost every reform agenda in contemporary schooling, yet remarkably little is known about what happens to it once classes become very large. This article examines how class size shapes the quality, frequency and pedagogical usefulness of written feedback, drawing on a dual corpus of 21 teacher interviews and 21 student questionnaires addressing the same problem. The analysis combines thematic coding with descriptive quantification. Teachers reported class sizes ranging from 42.5 to 80 students on midpoint estimates (M = 59.05); students, asked about the same classrooms, perceived still more congested rooms, from 60 to 85 (M = 73.71). Written feedback was reportedly provided on about 60% of student work across the teacher corpus, with a wide spread (35–85%) tied to workload and enrolment. What emerges is not a simple reduction in quantity but a compression effect: as enrolment rises, written feedback becomes shorter, less frequent, less individualized, and more strongly oriented toward error marking than toward guidance for revision. Students corroborate this pattern almost unanimously, describing comments that are legible but brief, repetitive, weakly personalized, and insufficiently explanatory. Both groups nonetheless maintain that feedback remains valuable, producing a paradox we describe as feedback that is useful but insufficient. Teachers compensate through peer work, standard comment banks, selective marking, collective correction and digital tools; none of these strategies removes the structural burden created by very large classes. The article argues that feedback quality should be theorized as a problem of sustainability, workload and institutional design as much as an instructional one, and draws implications for staffing policy, protected correction time, teacher professional development, and the redesign of feedback systems in high-enrolment contexts.