Year: 2024
Author: Jimena de Mello Heredia, Michael Henderson, Michael Phillips
Type of paper: Individual Paper
Abstract:
Feedback is widely recognised as one of the most powerful influences on students’ learning and an evidence-based pedagogical practice that can have a meaningful impact. Over the last decade, feedback conceptualisations moved from information transmission to interactional, relational, and dialogical processes. This shift positions students as active players who not only receive but also seek and elicit feedback information to understand expected quality standards. While student-elicited feedback can benefit learning, little is known about how to best leverage it. Hence, this paper examines two technology-mediated feedback encounters elicited by a student through videos sent to her lecturers in a blended unit of a postgraduate Education course at an Australian university. The student sought feedback information to understand whether her project proposal met the task requirements.
Two conceptual lenses underpin the study. The first adopts a sociocultural perspective, acknowledging that feedback processes unfold through social encounters among students, other course participants, including teachers, and resources, all revolving around work that teachers assign students to produce to assess their learning in the context of a unit or a subject. The second lens highlights the pivotal role of relationality in enabling dialogic feedback encounters between students and teachers. This framework emphasises the relational aspects inherently intertwined in feedback processes that can promote relationship-building and trust so students can feel welcome to elicit feedback encounters. Using a qualitative case study design, the data set includes email interactions between a student and a lecturer, feedback artefacts, unit assessment instructions, lectures and one student interview. Data collection was conducted in accordance with the university's ethical procedures and participants’consent, while the analysis followed the principles of reflexive thematic analysis. Trustworthiness measures, such as reflexivity and member checking, were undertaken. Results showed that those two feedback encounters elicited by the student partially and positively affected the student's decisions regarding her final project, suggesting that these interactions iteratively refined her focus and calibrated her understanding of the quality standards of the task. By acknowledging the importance of feedback designs that create opportunities for students to elicit feedback encounters, the paper also helps to identify useful principles that can guide future designs to encourage student-elicited feedback.
Two conceptual lenses underpin the study. The first adopts a sociocultural perspective, acknowledging that feedback processes unfold through social encounters among students, other course participants, including teachers, and resources, all revolving around work that teachers assign students to produce to assess their learning in the context of a unit or a subject. The second lens highlights the pivotal role of relationality in enabling dialogic feedback encounters between students and teachers. This framework emphasises the relational aspects inherently intertwined in feedback processes that can promote relationship-building and trust so students can feel welcome to elicit feedback encounters. Using a qualitative case study design, the data set includes email interactions between a student and a lecturer, feedback artefacts, unit assessment instructions, lectures and one student interview. Data collection was conducted in accordance with the university's ethical procedures and participants’consent, while the analysis followed the principles of reflexive thematic analysis. Trustworthiness measures, such as reflexivity and member checking, were undertaken. Results showed that those two feedback encounters elicited by the student partially and positively affected the student's decisions regarding her final project, suggesting that these interactions iteratively refined her focus and calibrated her understanding of the quality standards of the task. By acknowledging the importance of feedback designs that create opportunities for students to elicit feedback encounters, the paper also helps to identify useful principles that can guide future designs to encourage student-elicited feedback.