Feedback engagement as a multidimensional construct: a validation study

Abstract

While the term feedback engagement has become a buzzword in higher education, the constructs of feedback engagement have remained inadequately investigated, and research on the conceptualization and instrumentation of feedback engagement in the literature is limited. This paper presents the development and validation of a feedback engagement scale that both reflects a prevalent multidimensional perspective of engagement in general education and is grounded in the prior empirical feedback research. Psychometric tests were conducted with a large disciplinarily diverse sample of university undergraduate students (N = 872). Findings of both confirmatory factor analysis and multi-group confirmatory factor analysis provide evidence of reliability, validity, and measurement invariance, for capturing the behavioural, cognitive, emotional, and social components of feedback engagement in higher education settings. The feedback engagement scale can be utilized both as a diagnostic tool for teachers to assess the level of student feedback engagement in academic learning and as a research tool for researchers to investigate the dynamic interplays between student feedback engagement and other learner/learning achievement variables.

Keywords:

• Feedback
• feedback engagement
• scale validation

Acknowledgements

We are grateful for the participating students’ support for our study. We would also like to thank Professor Malcolm Tight, the Editor, and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.