To encourage feedback literacy as a steppingstone towards a lifelong learning mindset, it is important for students to understand and actively engage with feedback. Especially for first-year students it is important that feedback is targeted and coherent. However, the teaching staff currently has no possibility to follow up on feedback from colleagues and mainly gives feedback based on their own personal view which makes targeted and coherent feedback challenging.
The final goal of this project is to develop a feedback ecosystem as a set of interconnected tools where students, teaching staff and student counsellors can follow up the progress of the students throughout their intensive laboratory sessions and projects. The tools should encourage students to interact with their collected feedback. A first step in this development process is defining a rubric for evaluation and the development of a tool to be used as a framework to align the feedback given by the teaching staff.
To measure the impact of the developed feedback ecosystem, the feedback literacy of our first-year students will be analysed during a PhD trajectory. A questionnaire early in the academic year followed by focus group discussions at the end of the first semester, will help to understand first-year students’ prior experiences with feedback. A similar questionnaire and additional focus group discussions at the end of the academic year, will show if students advanced and will help to identify reasons which prevent them from consulting and engaging with feedback. New cohorts of first-year students will be followed for three consecutive years to analyse how changes in the feedback ecosystem affect student feedback literacy.
The continuous follow-up of the skills and perceptions of the students will help to identify the priorities in the successive development of the feedback ecosystem and to achieve a positive impact on feedback literacy.