Student feedback literacy denotes the understandings, capacities and dispositions needed to make sense of information and use it to enhance work or learning strategies. In this conceptual paper, student responses to feedback are reviewed and a number of barriers to student uptake of feedback are discussed. Four inter-related features are proposed as a framework underpinning students' feedback literacy: appreciating feedback; making judgments; managing affect; and taking action. Two well-established learning activities, peer feedback and analysing exemplars, are discussed to illustrate how this framework can be operationalized. Some ways in which these two enabling activities can be re-focused more explicitly towards developing students' feedback literacy are elaborated. Teachers are identified as playing important facilitating roles in promoting student feedback literacy through curriculum design, guidance and coaching. The implications and conclusion summarise recommendations for teaching and set out an agenda for further research.

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This paper focuses on peer feedback in relation to assessment processes. It examines the rationale for peer feedback, emphasising its potential for enhanced student learning. We draw on relevant literature to argue that the dominance of peer assessment processes using grades can undermine the potential of peer feedback for improving student learning. The paper throws further light on the issue by drawing on a large-scale questionnaire survey of tertiary students (1,740) and academics (460) in Hong Kong, supplemented by interview data. The findings indicate that a significant number of academics and students resist peer assessment using grades and that the majority report that students never or rarely grade each other in assessment activities. This paper explores why there is resistance, in particular, by academics to peer assessment and argues the case for a peer feedback process as an end in itself or as a precursor to peer assessment involving the awarding of marks. It also recommends some strategies for promoting peer feedback, through engaging students with criteria and for embedding peer involvement within normal course processes.

Feedback is central to the development of student learning, but within the constraints of modularized learning in higher education it is increasingly difficult to handle effectively. This article makes a case for sustainable feedback as a contribution to the reconceptualization of feedback processes. The data derive from the Student Assessment and Feedback Enhancement project, involving indepth semi-structured interviews with a purposive sample of award-winning teachers. The findings focus on those reported practices consistent with a framework for sustainable feedback, and particularly highlight the importance of student self-regulation. The article concludes by setting out some possibilities and challenges for staff and student uptake of sustainable feedback.

This paper focuses on the potential of the learning aspects of assessment. The term 'learning-oriented assessment' is introduced and three elements of it are elaborated: assessment tasks as learning tasks; student involvement in assessment as peer-or self-evaluators; and feedback as feedforward. I also indicate how learning-oriented assessment was promoted at the institutional level through a reflective analysis of a major funded project. Implications for practice are discussed through a focus on how learning-oriented assessment can be implemented at the module level.

Although task‐based teaching is frequently practiced in contemporary English language teaching, it is underresearched in state school settings. This article contributes to filling this gap in the literature by using qualitative case study data to explore how a task‐based innovation was implemented in three primary school classrooms in Hong Kong. Analysis of classroom observation and interview data shows how the case study teachers reinterpreted a new curriculum in line with their own beliefs and the practical challenges occurring in their school contexts. Drawing on classroom episodes, the article highlights three issues that proved problematic when the tasks were implemented: use of the mother tongue, classroom management or discipline problems, and the quantity of target language produced. Implications for the design and implementation of task‐based pedagogies in primary school contexts are discussed.

This paper explores some of the main barriers to the enhancement of feedback processes and proposes a framework for using dialogic feedback to foster productive student learning in the discipline. The framework suggests a feedback triangle focused on the content of feedback (cognitive dimension), the interpersonal negotiation of feedback (social-affective dimension) and the organisation of feedback provision (structural dimension). The interplay between these three elements is central to prospects for the enhancement of feedback processes. Derived from the framework is a set of six key features of optimal feedback practice which we represent as building blocks of an architecture of dialogic feedback. The paper concludes with a research agenda which suggests issues to be further explored in the cognitive, social-affective and structural dimensions.

This paper proposes a model of learning-oriented assessment to inform assessment theory and practice. The model focuses on three interrelated processes: the assessment tasks which students undertake; students' development of self-evaluative capacities; and student engagement with feedback. These three strands are explored through the analysis of assessment practice in context. The research method involves indepth classroom observations of five recipients of awards for teaching excellence across multiple disciplines; and semi-structured interviews with these teachers and a sample of their students. Findings highlight assessment tasks promoting thinking and practicing in the discipline; the use of critical reviews to develop student understandings of quality work; and 'same day feedback' to promote timely dialogues with students. The coherence of the model is discussed and some areas for further exploration are suggested.