Engaging students in feedback goes beyond giving correct answers. It involves teachers providing personalised feedback with actionable steps as well as school-wide processes to support quality feedback. To ensure meaningful and productive assessment feedback dialogues, student feedback literacy is arguably a necessary condition (Careless & Boud, 2018). Moreover, at the end of the day, it is only the students who can take action to improve their learning. Poorly-developed student feedback literacy can prove to be a barrier to the enactment of effective feedback practices and students’ uptake of feedback in the classroom and beyond school.

So, what constitutes student feedback literacy? Carless and Boud (2018) define student feedback literacy as “the understandings, capacities and dispositions needed to make sense of information and use it to enhance work or learning strategies” (p. 1316). According to the authors, students who are feedback literate “appreciate their own active role in feedback processes; are continuously developing capacities in making sound judgments about academic work; and manage affect in positive ways” (ibid, p. 1318). Affect is understood to encompass students’ emotions and attitudes. The authors proposed that a combination of these three enablers: ‘understandings’, ‘capacities’, and ‘dispositions’ maximises students’ potential to take action on feedback information. These inter-related aspects that serve as a framework underpinning student feedback literacy are shown below.