Feedback and focus: Exploring post-secondary students’ perceptions of feedback, mindfulness, and stress

The impact of evolving feedback ecology on students’ feedback literacy development remains underexplored. This study examined the effects of transitioning from secondary to higher education on students’ conceptions and practices of feedback literacy. The research involved 35 first-year associate’s degree students from various disciplines at a Hong Kong higher education institution. Through semi-structured interviews and reflective journals, changes and continuities in students’ feedback literacy were explored, alongside the critical ecological factors influencing these transformations. Three types of feedback literacy emerged – passive, bidirectional and self-regulated – representing varying degrees of student autonomy and teacher involvement in the feedback process. The study also identified contextual factors (e.g. continuous assessments, teacher–student consultation sessions, alternative communication and group dynamics) and individual factors that influenced students’ feedback practices. The implications of these findings for cultivating conducive feedback ecology and enhancing student feedback literacy are discussed.

Quality feedback is crucial to student success and learning experience; yet higher education continues to struggle with the provision of effective feedback. Scholarship in feedback studies has shifted from viewing feedback as a product transmitted from teachers to students, to promoting it as a two-way process in which students and teachers engage in interactive dialogue (Yang & Carless, 2013). However, predominant feedback practices still follow a one-way paradigm, with teachers having very limited understanding of how students engage with feedback. This is partly due to the difficulty in tracking ways learners interact with feedback. Consequently, there is a lack of support for students to benefit from feedback and for teachers to improve feedback strategies. To bridge the gap between students and teachers in a feedback process, we propose feedback analytics as a solution. Feedback analytics collects, analyses, and reports on students’ interactions with feedback. Such data-based insights have great potential to scaffold the development of students’ feedback literacy, manifested in active involvement in seeking feedback, interpreting it, acting on it, and regulating the emotions that may arise during feedback processes (Carless & Boud, 2018). By capturing, analyzing, and reporting data about learners’ interactions with feedback, feedback analytics can enhance reflections among learners on their learning progress and teachers on ways to support learners. In this presentation, we introduce a novel feedback analytics system that builds on key feedback theories including feedback literacy (Carless & Boud, 2018), dialogic feedback (Yang & Carless, 2013), and learner-centred feedback (Ryan et al., 2023). The tool can: a) support students to make sense of feedback and act on it; and b) support teachers to track student interactions with feedback and provide targeted support. The system contains a student-facing tool and a teacher-facing tool, both leveraging AI technologies to support key functionalities. The student-facing tool enables students to highlight and label feedback, create reflective notes and action plans, seek further explanations from Generative AI or teachers, and track their strengths, weaknesses, and action progress across multiple assessments and courses. The teacher-facing tool supports teachers to enhance feedback quality by assessing the alignment of their feedback with learner-centred principles and suggesting ways to improve it. It also helps teachers shape feedback strategies by providing data about students’ interactions with feedback through the functionalities mentioned above, in addition to students’ feedback requests and perceptions of feedback usefulness. The tool has been piloted in both lab and authentic learning settings, receiving positive feedback from educators and students on its potential to transform feedback practice, while noting the need to balance human judgement with AI suggestions.

The study examined the effects of interactionist dynamic assessment on EFL learners' feedback literacy in writing, comparing it with traditional written corrective feedback. It also explored learners' perceptions of this assessment approach. Using a quasi-experimental pre-test and post-test design, the study collected both quantitative and qualitative data. Quantitative data were gathered through the Feedback Literacy Scale to address the first research question regarding the impact of interactionist dynamic assessment on feedback literacy. Qualitative data were obtained from interviews to address the second research question concerning learners' perceptions of interactionist dynamic assessment. The findings indicated that interactionist dynamic assessment was more effective than written corrective feedback in enhancing students' feedback literacy. Learners reported predominantly positive experiences with interactionist dynamic assessment, noting improved understanding, increased motivation, a heightened awareness of errors, and a sense of being valued through individualized learning opportunities. Consequently, EFL teachers are encouraged to incorporate interactionist dynamic assessment into their writing classes to enhance the feedback process, improve student feedback uptake, and foster better teacher-student interactions.

Aims: The aim of this study was to explore undergraduate orthoptic students’ perceptions of feedback during clinical placement to allow the identification of common themes which could ultimately inform some guidance for tutors in the provision of feedback. Methods: This was a qualitative small case study conducted using semi-structured interviews with eight second year undergraduate orthoptic students from the University of Sheffield. All participants were female. Participation was voluntary and informed consent was obtained. Results: All students described some positive experiences of feedback during clinical placements. All students described at least one experience which they felt had been poor, and some commons themes of positive and negative experiences emerged. Conclusions: Students want an enjoyable placement where they feel able to practise their clinical skills in a safe environment and receive feedback from approachable tutors who do not undermine their confidence. They want a feedback process which is timely, honest, specific, offers ways to improve and reinforces positive behaviour. The feedback process should be made explicit to students so that both tutors and students are clear when feedback is being given.

Explorando la alfabetización en feedback en la formación de profesionales de la salud: un estudio cualitativo

For feedback processes to be effective, they need to involve students actively in generating, processing and responding to feedback information. Teacher transmission approaches are unlikely to provide a good investment of time and resources because they fail to draw sufficiently on student agency. In this conceptual article, it is argued that students need to be at the centre of feedback processes in making productive use of feedback inputs of various forms. The educator role lies in designing learning environments which provide plentiful opportunities for students to make evaluative judgments and take action in response to feedback information. The analysis is framed through the interlocking concepts of internal feedback which students generate for themselves; and students’ feedback literacy, the capacities to involve themselves productively in feedback processes. Student peer review with a written response, and using exemplars as proxies for teacher feedback are proposed as pedagogic options which stimulate the production of internal feedback and promote student feedback literacy. These two learning activities are analyzed to illustrate research-informed ways of enabling students to generate internal feedback by making comparisons between their own production and that of others. Digital affordances and possibilities are also discussed with particular emphasis on video peer feedback and annotated online exemplars. The main implications for practice are summarized in relation to educator and student roles, and related digital affordances. Challenges for implementation are discussed and addressed. An important consideration is to develop workload-friendly strategies which avoid the wastefulness of much current unproductive marking practices. The analysis suggests that shared teacher and student feedback literacy carries potential to facilitate principled research-informed ways forward for feedback processes.

Introduction Postsecondary education is being fundamentally transformed by rapid advances in digital technology, including its generative forms. Given the evolving landscape, we aimed to explore how digital technology is shaping postsecondary students' practices and perspectives on lifelong learning in the digital era. Methods The interpretive description approach guided our inquiry. We conducted five online focus groups with 18 university students in various professional programs. To analyze the data, we used template analysis in combination with reflexive thematic analysis. The self-determination theory framework of basic psychological needs guided the thematic synthesis of the focus group data, facilitating the development of a conceptual framework of postsecondary students' emerging lifelong learning practices and perspectives. Results The analysis of the focus group data resulted in 46 discrete codes grouped into 11 themes that were subsequently organized within Agency, Growth, Connection, and Envisioning Future categories. Overall, the results indicate that the reasons and the ways students engage with digital technologies enable them to experience agency, growth, and connection, thereby supporting their autonomy, competence, and relatedness needs in their immediate learning. These experiences, in turn, shape students' lifelong learning practices, in relation to their future professional status and future with technology. Discussion Students have integrated digital technologies into their immediate learning, with the clear expectation that these tools will be central to their lifelong learning in the digital economy. Our findings illustrate how digital technology (re-)shapes the cognitive and social aspects of learning, with implications for curriculum design, digital education research, and lifelong learning frameworks.

Feedback is an essential part of the teaching/learning processes. This statement is especially true in the introductory communication course where students receive feedback throughout the presentational speaking process. This paper explores how students define useful feedback based on 1,600 qualitative questionnaires that asked students about their perceptions of feedback. A thematic analysis of a randomly selected subset of 163 responses uncovered two themes: (1) feedback content characteristics (e.g., specific, constructive, praiseworthy, and purposive) and (2) process of instructor-provided feedback (e.g., iterative, timely). Based on these findings, a set of best practices for providing feedback is offered as a means to improve teaching/learning in the introductory communication course.

To realize the potential of feedback, students need to possess feedback literacy. Frequently implemented in writing classrooms, peer feedback activities carry unique potential for developing student feedback literacy. This paper proposes an instructional model of teacher-supported peer feedback in relation to the enhancement of student feedback literacy from a self-regulatory perspective. The paper conceptualizes student feedback literacy as learners’ capabilities to carry out core activities in feedback processes, including seeking, generating, processing, and using feedback during self-regulation. It outlines pertinent teacher support before, during, and after peer feedback activities to facilitate student writers’ seeking, generating, processing, and using of feedback during their behavioral self-regulation of writing encompassing self-observation, self-judgement, and self-reaction. The instructional model highlights teacher support to foster an active learner role in feedback processes by giving students opportunities to conduct several rounds of feedback calibration by themselves before seeking teacher feedback. Future studies may investigate the implementation and effectiveness of the instructional model.

Teacher feedback has been considered a potent lever for promoting learning. However, empirical studies often fail to reveal a positive relationship between feedback and learning outcomes. To unveil the complex mechanisms through which teacher feedback works, scholars have increasingly investigated student factors that can enable its benefits. Grounded in feedback literacy and self-regulated learning (SRL) theories, the present study explored the mediating roles of students’ emotion (i.e., reading enjoyment) and cognition (i.e., reading strategies) in the relationship between feedback and reading achievement. Multilevel structural equation modeling was conducted with 592,249 15-year-old students from 79 countries/territories in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2018 data. The results showed that teacher feedback had a negative direct effect on reading achievement but a positive indirect effect through reading enjoyment and strategies. These findings underscore the critical roles of students’ emotions and cognition in realizing the benefits of teacher feedback. Pedagogical implications for how teachers enhance adolescents’ positive emotions and learning strategies in feedback processes are discussed.

The main focus of this chapter is to analyse implications for short-term and long-term impacts of feedback by drawing on a qualitative longitudinal inquiry into four learners’ experiences of feedback during a five-year undergraduate programme. The student experience of feedback is conceptualized by a 3P model comprising presage, process and product factors. Learner feedback literacy is a key element spanning these three interactive cycles of the learner experience. Key findings from the study are learners’ wishes for stronger partnerships between teachers and learners in feedback processes, and evidence of challenges and possibilities for learner uptake of feedback. The main implications discuss ways of developing practical forms of feedback dialogue and future longitudinal research possibilities.

If feedback is to be conducted effectively, then there needs to be clarity about what is involved and what is necessary for teachers to be able to undertake it well. While much attention has recently been devoted to student feedback literacy, less has been given to what is required of teaching staff in their various roles in feedback processes. This paper seeks to elucidate teacher feedback literacy through an analysis of the accounts of those who do feedback well. An inductive analysis was undertaken of conversations about feedback with 62 university teachers from five Australian universities using a dataset of transcripts of interviews and focus groups from two earlier research studies. Through an iterative process a teacher feedback literacy competency framework was developed which represents the competencies required of university teachers able to design and enact effective feedback processes. The paper discusses the different competencies required of those with different levels of responsibility, from overall course design to commenting on students’ work. It concludes by considering implications for the professional development of university teachers in the area of feedback.

Universities around the world are attracting students and educators from increasingly diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds, which presents an exciting but complex context in which teaching and learning activities take place. An important aspect of educational practice is feedback, but there is evidence that there is often dissatisfaction among students about the feedback practices they experience. We argue that this situation is exacerbated by the lack of attention that has been paid to cultural and linguistic factors in feedback processes, particularly in highly internationalised institutions. We begin by exploring the complex concepts of culture and intercultural competence before providing an overview of some of the recent work on feedback literacy from student and teacher perspectives. We then make the case for an intercultural dimension, introducing the concept of intercultural feedback literacy. We conclude by presenting a model of how aspects of intercultural competence can enhance the practices of feedback literate students and teachers.

In order to make feedback become a process leading didactic practises it is necessary to overcome the static and single-directional vision linked to providing and receiving feedback and to go towards an interactive and generative feedback, foreseeing some peer feedback moments, some self-evaluation and self- regulation. In this paper we would like to describe a didactic path focused on feedback, activated in two University courses in different Universities with the following aims: activating subsequent feedback spirals (Carless, 2019), first between Professor and students, then between peers, to get to a self-awareness interior process, that is an incorporation of reflexivity on one's own practices. Promoting feedback literacy (Carless & Boud, 2018) in the student through the experimentation in the practice. In particular, we will account for a peer feedback process realised in the following steps: a) the group production of a learning design; b) the peer review of the colleagues' designs, through the "Ladder of Feedback" protocol, with a following sharing of the reviews; c) the subsequent reflection on the activated processes through a questionnaire on the students' perceptions. The analysis of those productions enables us to reflect upon the sense of effectiveness granted to the peer feedback, on the differences between the Professor's and the peer feedbacks, on the comprehension of the role of the peer feedback within the training process.

Globalization and increasing international mobility intensify the importance of intercultural competencies in public trust professions. Previous research indicates that cultural intelligence and multicultural personality are crucial in intercultural interactions. The aim of this study was to assess the level of cultural intelligence, multicultural personality traits, and perceptions of cultural differences among students of social sciences, medical sciences, and health sciences. In Poland, the scale of cross-border contacts continues to grow, creating an educational challenge in preparing future professionals for work in multicultural environments. The study employed a proprietary questionnaire along with the Cultural Intelligence Scale (CQS) and the short version of the Multicultural Personality Questionnaire (MPQ SF-40). A total of 102 students from a large university in southern Poland participated in the study. The findings revealed that social science students demonstrated significantly higher levels of cultural intelligence compared to students of medical and health sciences. Cultural intelligence was positively correlated with cultural empathy, open-mindedness, social initiative, and emotional stability. To date, no studies in Poland have addressed this issue. The results highlight the need to design educational programs that foster intercultural competencies while considering the specific professional roles and differences in student preparation.