The development of student feedback literacy: enabling uptake of feedback

Abstract

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.

Challenging feedback myths: Values, learner involvement and promoting effects beyond the immediate task

“…This brings us to our second myth: that feedback is a skill that resides in the teacher. Higher education initiatives worldwide focus on improving the “feedback‐telling” skills of teachers, and very few institutions focus on how to help learners to engage in feedback processes …”

“…The perceived usefulness of the feedback influences learner achievement and interest . Attention to this aspect can be seen in more recent models of feedback .…”

“…In this paper, we argue that involving the learner in feedback processes is the best way to navigate the emotional responses that are reported in teacher‐led feedback rituals characterised by one‐way information transmission. This means arming learners with feedback literacy, or the “understandings, capacities and dispositions needed to make sense of information and use it to enhance work or learning strategies.” Part of learner feedback literacy is indeed learning how to anticipate emotion and manage emotions in relational activities, particularly when there are disparate perspectives on performance between the learner and the “other,” whether that is the teacher, peer or patient…”

To Boldly Go: Feedback as Digital, Multimodal Dialogue

“…Feedback has become an instrument for ranking universities in the league tables produced by broadsheet newspapers, as well as a prominent theme in the National Student Survey (NSS) where final-year undergraduates are invited to comment on the quality of their higher education experience [28]. When the NSS website advertises the potential for its gathered data to influence the thinking of prospective university applicants, and results suggest that students are dissatisfied with the quality of what is being provided [29], feedback takes on a strategic importance than can sharpen the minds of education managers who might not otherwise have been so attentive to the frequency or focus of dialogue between students and tutors.…”

“…Mathisen asks, for instance, whether the video format might be particularly suited to the interests of some learners, and within particular academic disciplines, but less welcome or suitable in others. While Carless and Boud are amongst those who have acknowledged that students respond positively to digitally-mediated feedback, they also highlight the need to consider the importance of "affect," which they describe as the learner's "feelings, emotions and attitudes" [29] (p. 3). When a single of group students enter a classroom with varying abilities, interests, and histories, Mathisen, along with Carless and Boud, helpfully remind us to be alert to the value of personalizing feedback and consider varying feedback literacy and wider background.…”