A quick read ...

Excerpt from Goh, R. (2020, February 5). Engaging students in feedback. Retrieved from OPAL

• ... feedback lies at the heart of formative assessment in interpreting information from assessment, and adapting instructional practices accordingly, to address student learning gaps and improve teaching practices. So how can teachers provide feedback to students effectively and efficiently? How do we know that feedback has been effective? What differentiates effective feedback from ineffective feedback? The answers to these questions may be found in understanding the role of student engagement with feedback in making assessment feedback effective. The focus of effective feedback practice is, therefore, not only on what teachers do, but also on students’ understanding and their uptake of feedback information to improve their learning. Developing student feedback literacy is the sine qua non of helping students in their learning. (Goh, 2020, p.2)

• ... Engaging students in feedback goes beyond giving correct answers. It involves teachers providing personalized 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’ maximizes students’ potential to take action on feedback information. (Goh, 2020, p.17)

• The big idea of developing student feedback literacy is perhaps not just in helping students to clarify their understanding of standards and feedback comments, but also in helping them see the quality of their work through the teacher’s eyes. Sadler (1989) argues that “the indispensable conditions for improvement are that the student comes to hold a concept of quality roughly similar to that held by the teacher, is able to monitor continuously the quality of what is being produced during the act of production itself, and has a repertoire of alternative moves or strategies from which to draw at any given point. In other words, students have to be able to judge the quality of what they are producing and be able to regulate what they are doing during the doing of it” (p. 121).

Such feedback literacy enabling dialogue need not happen only after the task completion. In fact, such productive dialogue probably lies at the heart of all formative assessment processes. Feed up can take place, for instance, as part of introducing a formative assessment task, and as students are working on the task as part of in-task guidance. Two established learning practices, peer feedback and analyzing various exemplars of student work, are discussed below to illustrate ways in which feedback dialogue can be operationalized to enhance student feedback literacy. (Goh, 2020, pp. 20-21)

• ... students’ feedback literacy is arguably a key competency in their pursuit of sustainable learning. Engaging students in feedback and assessment to develop their capacity for self-assessment, for reflective and self-directed learning should be a priority area for all teachers in the Singapore classroom. Teachers with the support of middle and school leaders as well as school-wide support structures are more likely to focus on assessment for learning and employ feedback as a dialogic practice more often and be proficient at it over time. These are definitely assessment competencies that teachers would need to hone in order to well prepare our students to meet the challenges of an increasingly complex world. (Goh, 2020, pp.32-33)