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Iterative Resource

Feedback Literacy

What is Feedback Literacy?

Feedback literacy in this context is defined as: the understandings, capacities and dispositions needed to make sense of information and use it to enhance work or learning strategies. Students’ feedback literacy involves an understanding of what feedback is and how it can be managed effectively; capacities and dispositions to make productive use of feedback; and appreciation of the roles of teachers and themselves in these processes (Carless and Boud, 2018, p. 1316).

Why is Feedback Literacy Important?

Feedback is an essential part of the learning process. Effective feedback practice must combine short term and long-term functions, helping students to learn and to change (Chappuis, 2012). While this is an important facet to feedback, there are still many people who still regard feedback as a transactional process rather than a dialogical process. The feedback they provide simply refers back to the work completed and does not provide comments to help students in the future (Price et al., 2010; Carless, 2006).

Staff Feedback Literacy

According to Carless and Winstone (2020):

Teacher feedback literacy is defined as the knowledge, expertise and dispositions to design feedback processes in ways which enable student uptake of feedback and seed the development of student feedback literacy. Knowledge includes understandings of feedback principles and practice. Expertise encompasses the pedagogic skills and capacities to design and implement feedback processes in principled research-informed ways. Dispositions include the attitudes and will-power to overcome challenges and strive to develop productive feedback processes for students. The teacher knowledge, expertise and dispositions are enacted within disciplinary learning activities which require appreciation of how effective feedback processes are managed within specific disciplines (153).

Student Feedback Literacy

We need to help students take ownership of the cooking process: Students need to understand what feedback is, and the purpose it serves in their learning. Students need to understand that no-one produces perfect work and that constructive feedback is an opportunity for learning, rather than an indication that students are in some way not good enough (O’Donovan, Rust, and Price, 2019; Dunworth and Sanchez, 2016). Students can take ownership by giving self and peer feedback, attending office hours to ask for clarification related to feedback, and becoming comfortable using the feedback as a learning tool informing future work rather than as a temporary and disposable experience (Bailey and Garner, 2010).

Staged assignments, blogs and projects that allow dialogue about ongoing work are better ways forward (Carless et al, 2011). In a programme level approach, attention should also be given to supporting students to carry forward learning from feedback to future modules. Setting up class activities or a reflective feedback portfolio, where students reflect on past feedback in relation to a current assignment may be fruitful.

Through the course of their studies, students will get many types of feedback related to assessments. It is important that students are exposed to a range of assessment and feedback styles that are appropriate to the programme and discipline of study, and that fit with the Learning Outcomes (Habeshaw, Gibbs and Habeshaw, 1993; Biggs, 2007). It is possible to give the students too many options though, and not every assessment and feedback option will be appropriate for the programme. Students need to taste the same assignment multiple times to develop skill in discerning what makes for good work in that context.

Programme-level feedback processes need to take into account the students’ starting points and build gradually over time toward students being able to independently evaluate and enhance their own and others’ work (Boud and Falchicov, 2006; Nicol and MacFarlane-Dick, 2006; Sadler, 2010). Students’ prior assessment experiences will often have involved extensive in-class guidance, repeated redrafting of work and formative feedback from teachers (Beaumont, O’Doherty, and Shannon, 2011) so transitions away from this level of support must be gradual.

Feedback in Your Context

How could you engage your students more with their feedback?
What strategies would you use if resource were no issue?
What strategies can you use in reality?
Does it have to be you that provides it?
What tech options are can help with feedback engagement (and burden)?

Other Things to Consider

How does your feedback practice fit within the Programme (ipsative/developmental, practice-based etc.)?
Do the Programme ILOs feature in your feedback at all (could you ‘blueprint’ it to find out)? Why might this be useful?
What about graduate attributes and professional requirements – do you feed back on these? Why or why not?