Reconsidering student feedback literacy from an ecological perspective

Abstract

In response to the paradigm shift of feedback from information to process, the notion of ‘student feedback literacy’, which refers to students’ capacities and dispositions to use feedback, has been increasingly promulgated in the higher education assessment literature recently. Student feedback literacy has been conceptualized into three interrelated characteristics – the ability to appreciate feedback, make judgments and manage emotions – which potentially lead to successful student uptake of feedback information. This commentary is a response to recent attempts to conceptualize student feedback literacy and aims to reconsider the concept from an ecological perspective of learning using a multi-dimensional model comprising three components: the engagement dimension, the contextual dimension and the individual dimension. This expanded model of student feedback literacy is informed by sociocultural theory and the notion of learner agency. Referring to the proposed framework, future research directions on student feedback literacy are put forward.

Keywords:

• Feedback
• feedback literacy
• sociocultural theory
• agency
• ecological perspective

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the editor and the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this paper. I also benefited immensely from the feedback provided by Professor David Carless from the University of Hong Kong and Dr. Neil Johnson from the University of Sunderland on a version of this paper. All these comments have helped strengthen this paper. I acknowledge that this paper is adapted from my PhD thesis.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sin Wang Chong

Sin Wang Chong is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in TESOL at Queen's University Belfast. He specialises in assessment feedback, learning-oriented assessment, computer-assisted language learning, learner autonomy, and research synthesis. He is the Associate Editor of Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching (Taylor & Francis).