Optimising feedback for learning: It's what the student does that counts
Phillip Dawson, Joanna Tai and Laura Hughes, Centre for Research in Assessment and Digital Learning (CRADLE), Deakin University
Australian higher education teachers collectively spend thousands of hours on feedback every year that ends up in feedback graveyards – unread comments languishing in the darkest corners of learning management systems. Even in those cases where students do read feedback, they often report that it is emotionally challenging and hard to understand, let alone use. You could argue it’s a waste of time and effort on both sides.
Something has to change.
For a long time, the problems with feedback were met with a call to improve the quality of comments students receive on their work. This makes sense, to a point. Yes, students need useful inputs to their learning processes, but no matter how good the feedback comment, if it isn’t used by the student, it just becomes dangling data.
Enter: feedback literacy, “the understandings, capacities and dispositions needed to make sense of information and use it to enhance work or learning strategies”.
Scholars argue that if students don’t know what to do with feedback, or don’t want to engage with it, they won’t be able to capitalise on even the most helpful suggestions they receive. Furthermore, if we can develop their feedback literacy, students will be able to make the most of feedback even when the comments aren’t ideal.
These ideas have piqued the interest of many practitioners, and there is a burgeoning industry of feedback literacy interventions, using approaches such as asking students to incorporate feedback on revisions of written tasks, or students offering comments to their peers using pre-determined criteria. While the evidence for their success is still emergent, it appears that these interventions do improve feedback literacy, or at least what students believe about feedback.
But wait, wasn’t the problem what students do with feedback, not what they think about it?
That’s where our work on feedback literacy as behaviour comes in.
Taking our cue from John Biggs, who famously argued that learning is “what the student does”, we think feedback literacy is ultimately in the doing. You can have all the fancy ideas in the world about what you would do in an ideal feedback setting, but if you don’t actually do them when the going gets tough, what’s the point?
As part of an ARC Discovery Project, we’re currently working on designing and implementing interventions that focus on helping students to do better in feedback situations. Here’s five tips from what we’ve learned so far on designing feedback literacy behaviour interventions:
Feedback literacy is too big a set of actions to target in one intervention. Instead, focus on a sub-component. We conceptualise these as: seeking feedback; making sense of feedback; using feedback; managing affect; and providing feedback information.
Don’t just tell students what to do, scaffold their doing. For example, if you are targeting feedback seeking, consider using an assignment coversheet that requires them to make a specific feedback request and also shows them how to formulate such a request.
Normalise struggling with feedback through sharing your own experiences. Students may be surprised to learn that their educators can struggle with feedback too. For example, you could try using intellectual candour and telling students about what you do to work with emotions in feedback.
Work longitudinally on feedback literacy. One-off workshops on feedback or tasks confined to one unit of study are unlikely to have significant lasting effects since they don’t allow students to practice and hone their feedback related capabilities. We need to think programmatically about feedback literacy. The needs of first year students transitioning into higher education are different from those of students moving into graduate employment.
There is no one size fits all. Different cohorts of students, and different students within cohorts, are going to have different needs. Consider how your feedback literacy work supports student agency in owning their own development.
If you’ve been reading all this and thinking “hmmm… I wonder how feedback literate I am?” then you are in luck: there are a range of free feedback literacy self-assessment tools available. We have one available online that provides personalised advice based on your scores. For more information on the survey and how you can use it yourself and with your students, see https://www.feedbackliteracy.org/take-the-flbs
Phillip Dawson, Co-Director, CRADLE, Deakin University
Joanna Tai, Senior Research Fellow, CRADLE, Deakin University
Laura Hughes, Associate Research Fellow, CRADLE, Deakin University