The importance of engaging student agency is often mentioned as a key feature of feedback practices. Commonly, the concept of agency is used to refer to students’ active role in the process of offering, receiving and acting upon feedback information. However, the notion of what student agency means is often taken-for-granted and rarely elaborated. Furthermore, earlier literature has mainly focussed on individualised and psychological conceptualisations of the term. What could feedback design learn from the idea of ‘agency’ – that dates back to writings of authors such as Aristotle and Kant? In this presentation we briefly introduce three conceptualisations for ‘student agency’ (sociomaterial, authorial and discursive) as proposed in earlier sociological and philosophical literature to understand the sociocultural aspects of feedback processes and students’ feedback literacy. Most importantly, we introduce what these three theoretical frameworks can offer us to further understand and develop feedback design in higher education. For instance, we highlight the importance to consider how agency is shared between humans and non-humans such as computers (sociomaterial agency), how feedback could be framed as a way of community-building (authorial agency), and how effective feedback practices could aim at disrupting student positioning as ‘performers’ rather than as lifelong learners (discursive agency). Overall, these three conceptualisations highlight the importance of structural changes for the contexts of feedback as a part of feedback interventions aiming to promote ‘student agency’.
The importance of engaging student agency is often mentioned as a key feature of feedback practices. Commonly, the concept of agency is used to refer to students’ active role in the process of offering, receiving and acting upon feedback information. However, the notion of what student agency means is often taken-for-granted and rarely elaborated. Furthermore, earlier literature has mainly focussed on individualised and psychological conceptualisations of the term. What could feedback design learn from the idea of ‘agency’ – that dates back to writings of authors such as Aristotle and Kant? In this presentation we briefly introduce three conceptualisations for ‘student agency’ (sociomaterial, authorial and discursive) as proposed in earlier sociological and philosophical literature to understand the sociocultural aspects of feedback processes and students’ feedback literacy. Most importantly, we introduce what these three theoretical frameworks can offer us to further understand and develop feedback design in higher education. For instance, we highlight the importance to consider how agency is shared between humans and non-humans such as computers (sociomaterial agency), how feedback could be framed as a way of community-building (authorial agency), and how effective feedback practices could aim at disrupting student positioning as ‘performers’ rather than as lifelong learners (discursive agency). Overall, these three conceptualisations highlight the importance of structural changes for the contexts of feedback as a part of feedback interventions aiming to promote ‘student agency’.
The focus of feedback research is extending from studies on the form of effective feedback, to studies on proactive feedback engagement of its receiver. However, studies keep showing that feedback often is not used to its full potential. This is often explained by students not being prepared for this proactive role in feedback. It is thus vital for teachers to explicitly address and support this to their students. Therefore, drawing from the concept of the Zone of Proximal Development, this paper presents an instructional model for feedback engagement.
The model outlines feedback engagement as comprising two student responsibilities each containing two feedback engagement strategies. The first student responsibility is to show independent problem solving, including the strategies: (1) making sense of feedback on a task, process, and self-regulation level and (2) using feedback through goal-setting and action-planning. The second student responsibility is to share information that is relevant to their development, including the strategies: (3) communicating on feedback use and (4) seeking feedback. For strategy 3 the acronym SUPER is developed to support students in sharing relevant information on feedback use.
SUPER: Shared perception, Use of feedback, Product improvements, Emotional impact, Request for feedback.
For strategy 4 the acronyms POWER and CLOSER are developed to support students in asking for relevant and concrete feedback.
POWER: Problem definition, Option overview, Weights of options, Express own preference, Request for feedback.
CLOSER: Context, Learning Objective, Self-Evaluation, Request for feedback
Based on this instructional model, an extended definition for feedback engagement is proposed including all four strategies. This fits in the current development of viewing feedback from a programmatic perspective. It aims to provide teachers with concrete tools to support their students’ feedback literacy and thus proactive feedback engagement. The ultimate goal of feedback literacy is to prepare students to be lifelong learners.
Introduction
The conceptualisation and practice of feedback in health professional education is transitioning from a model of the expert delivering judgement of the student’s workplace performance, to a process of co-construction between student and educator. This requires students to understand the purpose of feedback, and have the skills and opportunities required to utilise feedback. Defined as feedback literacy, these capabilities are import for students to develop such that they can be successful in using feedback both within and beyond settings for learning. What is not yet clear is how feedback literacy can be developed, particularly in the clinical environment.
Methods
Our study explored the impact of an educational intervention that aimed to develop the feedback literacy of occupational therapy and physiotherapy students through near peer mentoring during a clinical placement. Data sources were post-placement educator (n=12) and student (n=23) interviews, and senior students’ (n=10) ‘think-aloud’ interviews based on recorded feedback conversations. Data was analysed through the theoretical lens of practice architectures (Edwards-Groves & Kemmis, 2016), enabling a focus on enactments of feedback in relation to developing feedback literacy.
Findings & Discussion
Feedback conversations occurred within the context of the senior-junior student relationship. Two dominant practices characterised the feedback: (i) creating a comfortable learning environment in which to engage in the feedback process, including being aware of and accommodating junior students’ emotional response, and (ii) ensuring feedback for learning, including pitching this in a way that junior students could understand.
The ways in which senior students facilitated feedback conversations with junior students included elements of their own educators’ practices which they then modified to suit their near-peer mentor role. While much of the literature has focused on the development of educators, this research suggests that developing students’ feedback literacy through near-peer mentoring can support students to become educators of the future.
Feedback literacy research has variously cast the teacher in the role of ‘information provider’, or ‘contributor‘ to feedback dialogue, focussing on cognitive, and social-affective learner processes. If feedback is considered from an alternate, sociomaterial perspective (Gravett 2020), the role of all actors (human and non-human), and the importance of the interplay between those actors, resources, contexts, and structures, comes to the fore (Biesta & Tedder, 2007).
From this perspective, feedback literacies might be more than just a set of predetermined skills or capabilities. They could be understood as how an individual ‘reads the world’ (Freire, 1985) and participates in emergent situations which are not wholly under any one person’s control. In this framing, we contend that the role of one of these key actors: the ‘teacher’ needs to be further explored. We introduce the notion that there is a multiplicity of capabilities, and a symmetry of feedback literacies between learners and teachers, where context and role of both self and others are acknowledged.
We explore feedback literacies from a Theory of Practice Architectures perspective, which allows us to illuminate and interrogate the structures which influence the possibilities for feedback practice. We build on previous conceptions of teacher feedback literacy (Winstone & Carless 2020) to highlight the interrelatedness of teacher and learner practices, and how knowing not only one’s own role, but how human and non-human actors co-produce practices, underpins feedback literacies.
This conceptual work has implications for both feedback practice and research. It will open up possibilities for seeing teacher and student feedback literacies not as separate capabilities to develop, but as entangled and embodied knowing and acting. This may shift the focus of efforts to develop feedback literacies within educational settings. Future avenues and methodologies for research on teachers’ feedback literacies in higher education will also be shared.
(References can be supplied but are beyond the limits of this form)
In this talk we frame feedback within the wider context of teaching and make the case for using a discourse analytic approach to examining feedback talk in seminar classrooms. The higher education literature on feedback has generally focused on written feedback, with scant attention paid to verbal feedback. We report on a study which built on a small but emerging body of literature focusing on verbal, dialogic feedback and its role in supporting students’ learning. We drew on discourse analysis to identify linguistic and rhetorical indicators of feedback talk in six seminar events. The feedback talk was classified into codes which formed the basis of stimulated recall interviews held with tutors of two seminars to discuss their perceptions and understandings of verbal feedback. We argue that a framework of feedback talk provides a heuristic which can help us to further understand the relationship between feedback and teaching, and which teachers can use to examine their own feedback talk.
Typically, students are used to receiving text-based feedback on their work. However, as teaching and learning practices continue to expand into digital and technology-enhanced spaces, so too do possibilities for multimodal types of feedback.
Framed within the existing literature on feedback literacy and specifically that relating to audio and video feedback (Henderson & Phillips, 2015; Mahoney, Macfarlane, & Ajjawi, 2018), this lightning talk will explore the results of a scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) research study that sought to understand the effects of video feedback on feedback literacy and engagement. During the 2019-20 academic year, I recorded nearly 800 videos in order to provide the pre-service teacher education students in my Digital Technology and Social Media Applications course with feedback solely in video format. At the conclusion of the course, students were invited to complete a qualitative electronic survey. Results identified a lack of prior experience with video feedback, and yet unanimous agreement that the video feedback was more useful than previous non-video feedback. All participants (n=12) said that in their future K-12 teaching, they would be “somewhat likely” or “very likely” to use video feedback. Interestingly, they also identified specific details about their development of feedback literacy as a result of receiving video feedback.
On the other hand, implementing video feedback affects the instructor greatly. I will round out this session with reflections from my teaching journal on the process of giving video feedback. For instance, there were aspects to giving feedback that were unsustainable, such as the time commitment, and others that were truly rewarding (greater attention to individual student work). The lasting message from this study is that video feedback, like any type of feedback, should be deliberate, timely, ongoing, and specific (Carless & Boud, 2018).
A cross school project between The School of Health Sciences and The School of Pharmacy & Biomolecular Sciences at The University of Brighton was successful in introducing self and peer assessment of reflective writing as a formative assessment for level 4 and level 5 work-based learning modules, for students undertaking a Foundation Degree. The aim of the project was to proactively engage students to develop both their reflective writing skills, and their confidence in giving and receiving structured feedback using a clear model. These skills are vital for the development of students to prepare them to be competent reflective practitioners and assessors in clinical practice, capable of giving meaningful feedback to future learners and peers. To achieve this project three senior lecturers worked closely with a learning technologist, to ensure a rigorous and straight-forward process for the students.
Overall, there was a positive response to the task, for example during the project evaluation when asked ‘How likely do you feel that this process has supported you to develop skills in giving feedback in the clinical setting?’ A student responded, “I feel I could deliver the positive feedback sandwich and still maintain respect and good feeling between myself and a fellow peer”. This shows that the emotional impact of feedback is recognised by students and this process made them feel that they are better prepared to give feedback in the future.
This session will include an overview of the project, and an evaluation using student feedback and project team experience of using this method.
References:
Bain, J., Ballantyne, R., Packer, J. and Mills, C. (1999) Reflection in learning and professional development: theory and practice. Abingdon: Routledge.
Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice [Online], 5 (1), pp. 51-73.
Moon, J. (1999) Reflection in learning and professional development: theory and practice. Abingdon: Routledge
A Dialogic Technology-Mediated Model of Feedback Uptake and Literacy
Abstract
Despite the importance of feedback uptake in higher education, there is still much to learn about supporting it. Recent perspectives hold that guiding learners through feedback uptake oriented activities may also help them to develop feedback literacy. However, due to the acceleration of digitisation trends in higher education, there is an increasing need to explore feedback uptake and literacy development, exploiting opportunities offered by digital environments. This need constitutes a significant gap that is of immediate importance to practitioners teaching online and will also be crucial in a post-COVID-19 context in which the use of blended and online learning is expected to increase. This conceptual presentation draws on a synthesis of existing feedback uptake, formative assessment, and technology literature to offer a technology-mediated dialogic model of feedback uptake and literacy. Focused on how technological-mediation can enrich opportunities for co-regulation of the processes involved in feedback uptake and the development of feedback literacy, the model is intended for use in designing classroom feedback practices that can be embedded in standard curricula. The model serves to inform the discussion of feedback uptake and the nascent discussion of teacher feedback literacy in the digital settings in which many feedback practices in higher education now take place.
Student engagement with their feedback is often limited, with some students only looking at their mark and not accessing the feedback comments at all. Part of the reason for this is that students often cannot see where the feedback can be applied in the future – known as having somewhere for feedback to land. Often feedback is provided after work on a module has finished and with no further work on that module, students may lack the feedback literacy to use their feedback as feedforward for other modules or see the link to other pieces of work, even if they are not the same format.
In this pilot study, we flipped the feedback for two pieces of coursework in a module and asked students to submit a draft report prior to releasing generic feedback and a self-evaluation for the students to complete based on common errors from previous years. As part of this reflection, the students needed to rate themselves against the mark scheme, identify things they were already doing well, things they could improve on and things they need to start doing. Additionally, students were asked to identify one or two areas that they would like specific feedback on. They were then allowed to submit a final version of their report. Both versions of the report were marked using an online rubric with only very brief, generic feedback statements. Students were surveyed to determine their satisfaction with this approach, with an overwhelmingly positive response, as well as an average 9% increase in scores from draft to final version ranging from 0 to 31% improvement.
Overall the average mark for the coursework in this module rose by 7% from 55% to 62% compared to last year’s cohort who did not use the flipped feedback approach. Despite marking the draft and final submission, actual staff marking time decreased as fewer comments needed to be made on submissions as students had self-identified their shortcomings. Overall this approach has shown a positive improvement of student engagement with their feedback and enhanced learning opportunities.